A Taste of Ashes
by William Easley
Summary: Dipper knew the magic shop hadn't been there yesterday - and might vanish tomorrow. But he'd learned caution. He wasn't about to go jumping into something supernatural . . . was he? Continues the series of stories about the Pines twins' second summer in Gravity Falls and does include Wendip.
1. Chapter 1

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 1: Just Outside of Reality**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines** _ **:**_ _July 22-We have only a little more than five weeks left here in Gravity Falls, and yet there is so much I want to do! Great-Uncle Ford says I probably won't have any luck tracking down the Venus' woodpecker trap tree. He points to the abundance of woodpeckers to argue for the rarity of its plant predator, and maybe he's right. It could be just one of those legends that isn't really true, not even in Gravity Falls, like the Hide-Behind._

 _So I decided that, even with time growing short, I would slack off just a little. So this morning after Wendy put me through our workout (oh, right, I meant to note that Wendy has me on an exercise routine, but I'm always too tired to write about it), I reluctantly agreed when Mabel wanted me to walk into town with her._

" _C'mon, Mabel," I said at first. "I ran two miles in thirty minutes just now! I need to rest!"_

" _Two miles is nothing!" Mabel insisted. "Say . . . are you and Wendy running every day?"_

" _Every single day," I said. "Even her days off."_

" _Ah! Methinks the lady doth be training you! For a . . . marathon! Wah-wah!"_

" _We're not running that far," I told her._

" _Double entendre, bro-bro!" She poked my face and went "boop-boop" for, well, too many times. And also I think she mispronounced "entendre." But anyway she got me out of my chair._

 _We went through the gift shop on the way out, and Wendy said, "Hey, meant to tell ya, man. You did good today, Dip, so I think tomorrow we may go an extra ten minutes on the run. Get ready for me early."_

" _Oh, he's ALWAYS ready for you, Wendy!" Mabel said._

 _I clamped my hand over her mouth and dragged her outside. She kept licking my palm._

 _It's only about a mile walk into town, and I have to say that after a week of exercises and running, it didn't actually seem all that far. But then we got into town—there were plenty of people already up and about at 9:30—and Mabel said she wanted to go to the craft store, the drug store, and the candy shop. I told her I'd hang out in the arcade to wait for her._

 _So I turned the corner and stopped and blinked and wondered if I'd gone out of my mind._

 _Because tucked between the arcade and the coffee shop café—and believe me, there is NO ROOM between the arcade and the coffee shop—I saw a narrow wooden building, no more than ten feet wide, and two stories tall. Five steps led up to an arched doorway; beside it was an arched, narrow window, curtained inside with what looked like purple velvet; and stenciled over the door was an arched sign: MAGICK SHOP. It was aged wood, I could tell, looking all splintery under layers of crumbling gray paint. Everything about it seemed to warn "STAY AWAY!"_

 _I wanted to go in._

 _I can't explain WHY I wanted to go in, because both my arms broke out in goosebumps and I got that cold-to-the-bone feeling I've had before in the presence of ghosts._

 _But—a magic shop just appearing overnight, like a mushroom after a hard rain? One standing in a place where obviously no building could possibly fit? Oh, man, this was like a cliché right out of fairy tales and second-rate fantasy stories! The Little Shop that Wasn't There, you might call it. The kind of place where they sell three wishes that end in disaster, or a love potion that works too well, or—you get the idea._

 _I stood there just staring, blinking my eyes and wondering if maybe perhaps I was dreaming and was in the Mindscape. But, no, the sun was pretty hot, I was sweating a little, and when I pinched myself, it hurt. Not as hard as when Mabel does it, but still._

 _The shop seemed, well, dead. In a metaphorical way. I think that's what it's called. I mean, no lights inside it, no noise, no sign that any of the passers-by even noticed the place. Nobody glanced at it, and certainly nobody went up the five steps to the door._

 _Mr. Gleeful, Gideon's dad, came around the corner with a couple of shopping bags in his arms, and I stopped him. "Excuse me, Mr. Gleeful," I said, "but how long has this place been here?"_

 _He glanced over. "The café? Oh, I'd say just about fifteen years or so."_

" _No, the—"_

 _The goosebumps on my arms felt like they wanted to fly to my spine._

 _There was no Magick Shop there at all. Just the arcade and next to it the coffee shop. "Uh, thanks, sir," I said lamely._

" _You're certainly welcome. Hey, tell your uncle for me that any time he wants to trade in that classic car of his'n, I'll give him a right good deal, you hear?"_

" _Yes, sir." Though there wasn't a chance in the world that Grunkle Stan would trade in the Stanleymobile. Mr. Gleeful went on around the corner._

 _I shrugged. Weird stuff happens in this town. Hallucinating a store isn't even in my top ten. So I felt in my pocket for my folding money—I had ten dollars in ones that I intended to change into quarters, and with luck that would last for as long as Mabel's shopping spree._

 _But—the Magick Shop was there again. I'd hardly taken my eyes off it, but it had vanished and then come back. This was definitely making its way up the charts. In fact, the Gobblewonker had to move over as it climbed past. I walked over to the steps and put my foot on the bottom one. It was solid. I walked to the top step—but not onto the front stoop. Nothing would persuade me to get that close to the door._

 _I thought furiously, but could remember nothing in the Journals that covered a situation like this. I felt at a loss, but—_

" _I'll ask Great-Uncle Ford," I told myself. He'll know what to do._

 _And then—then the shop door slowly, soundlessly, opened . . . ._

* * *

Reminding himself to breathe slowly to prevent hyperventilation, Dipper paced back and forth on the sidewalk opposite the Arcade, his eyes watering because he wanted to keep the intruding shop under close observation and tried to avoid even blinking. "Come on, come on," he kept muttering, wondering when Stanford Pines would get there.

The morning was heating up, with bright sun and a fair sky—not a cloud in it. Yet traffic was slow on a sleepy summer Monday—few pedestrians passed, and even fewer vehicles. Every time a car went by on one of the side streets, Dipper hoped it would be Stan's treasured El Diablo with both of his grand-uncles in it.

For twelve or so times, it was not.

The magic-shop door had closed slowly again, and without the least sound, as Dipper had retreated in near panic, stumbling down the five steps, nearly falling when he reached the sidewalk. Then he had dashed across the street, backing away because he had the feeling that the door could open and something might come out of it—

His walking backward caused a heavy kid, a boy ten or eleven years old riding a bike, to wobble dangerously as he narrowly avoided a collision. "Hey, doofus, watch it!" the boy yelled, pedaling furiously as he went around the corner.

Dipper didn't respond, but by the time he stood on the opposite sidewalk the shop door looked firmly closed again. He patted his vest pocket, found his phone, and took it out and snapped three or four quick photos, without really aiming. Then he called his great-yuncle Stanford's number—it was number 1 on speed-dial—and to his relief immediately heard the reassuring baritone on the other end: "Good morning, Dipper! How are things?"

"Not so good," he said, his voice shaking. He hurriedly explained what was going on and then as he waited for Ford to reply, he started biting his lip. _What if he just thinks I'm crazy, or fishing for attention? What if the shop disappears while I'm talking to him?_

But to his relief, Ford seemed to take him seriously: "Intriguing. I'll come downtown right away. Just let me pack a few instruments and we'll see if we can learn anything about this unusual phenomenon."

"Bring Grunkle Stan, too," Dipper blurted.

Ford chuckled. "Why? Does this shop have a 'Poker Day' sign on the door?"

"No, but—but Grunkle Stan is good to have if, you know—if things get rough."

A moment of silence and then Ford said, "Right you are. I'll collect him and we'll be over as soon as possible. In the meantime, Dipper, I think you did the right thing. Stay away from that place. It's probably nothing dangerous, but there's no sense taking chances in a place where a tree can eat a woodpecker."

When the connection broke, Dipper felt a tingle of guilt. Had his great-uncle Ford sounded slightly hurt at Dipper's asking for Stan to come, too? The two brothers had reconciled nearly a year earlier, after the cataclysm of Weirdmageddon and Stan's heroic sacrifice, but—but they weren't as close as Dipper and Mabel, even now. Dipper didn't want to hurt Ford's feelings, but—well, Stan had saved his life when zombies threatened, and the old man had proved he really cared for Dipper and Mabel, and—

 _Why do I always beat myself up over things like this?_ Sometimes Dipper felt very close to adulthood. Other times he wondered if he would ever be the man he hoped he could become.

Dipper didn't dare look at his phone to read the time—his eyes ached because he stayed so focused on the strange shop—but he judged that half an hour had already gone by when, finally, he heard the rumble of the Stanleymobile's engine, and the long classic car glided to the curb. Stan usually parallel parked by the simple method of shoving any other inconvenient cars out of the way, but this early on a Monday there were plenty of open slots, and the car braked, the engine died, and both front doors opened as the original Mystery Twins stepped out.

Dipper glanced over and beckoned.

And—of course—when he looked back, the shop had vanished. He groaned, "Oh, no, no, no!"

"Where is this apparition?" Ford asked as he walked over.

"It was right there!" Dipper pointed, and his great-uncles glanced over, then stared at each other, and then at him. "I swear, great-uncle Ford, it was right between the Arcade and the café! It was there. I mean, I walked up the front steps!"

"Indeed?" Ford murmured. He carried a backpack, and he reached inside for an instrument, which he aimed across the street. "Let's see what the readings are."

"Spooky store, huh?" Grunkle Stan rasped, coming to stand behind Dipper. "Some nerve of 'em, openin' a place that competes with the Mystery Shack! Maybe a little creative arson is in order."

"Stanley," Ford murmured absently, "that honestly would result only in the destruction of the arcade and café. Hmm. Bizarre readings. It looks as if there's indeed a disturbance—"

"In the Force?" Stan asked.

"No, no, in the fabric of reality," Ford said. "But it's not really all that strong. I've seen much higher readings than these—around unicorns they're triple this, for example. And Bill Cipher, well, if he were around it'd be off the scale! But there is definitely something odd about the juncture of those two buildings."

Dipper was looking at the gallery of photos on his phone. Most were sneaked shots of a freckled redheaded girl, but the last three showed—

"Look at this," Dipper said. "It shows something was there."

Ford took the phone and both Stans looked at the image. "Fascinating," Ford said.

"Yeah, yeah, Mr. Spock," Stan rumbled. "But what is it? I mean, I see the arcade and the café, and there's like a blotchy, misty, wavery gray spot in between them that obviously ain't there now, but it's not a shop."

"No, it isn't. It's something just on the other side of real," Stanford said. "Maybe—I don't know, maybe we can't see it because we're adults. Or maybe it's searching for a special kind of mind."

"Hah! Out of luck with me, then. I don't have one of them!"

"No, no, I mean it may need a young mind, an imaginative one—Dipper's, in fact. Perhaps only a young person can see the shop _qua_ shop. Perhaps in the whole town, only Dipper can see it, or enter it."

"I'm not interested," Dipper said.

"Good," Ford said in a decisive tone. "Such things can bode very ill for you, Dipper."

"For Mabel, too," Stan said. "For the bode of you! Get it? It's funny 'cause it's a pun!"

Ford pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes and sighed. "Yes, Stanley, it's a danger for both Dipper and Mabel. Remember, Dipper, curiosity can be used as a lure. It's possible this is just an accidental intrusion, with nothing malevolent behind it. Such things happen occasionally."

"Try all the time, Poindexter," Stan said. "While you were away, nutty stuff was always happenin' around the Shack. One day a rock asked me to roll it over 'cause it was getting sunburned on the top."

"What did you do?" Dipper asked.

"Rolled it over. In exchange, it told me where I could find its brother. It's a rock that looks like a face."

"Oh, yeah," Dipper said.

"It was homeless, so I offered it a place near the Shack—"

"That's not exactly a parallel, Stanley," Ford said.

"Oh, no? Well get this: One late evening on the stair, I met a man who wasn't there! So I kicked him to the bottom and chased him into the forest."

"Probably a low-level apparition or ghost," Stanford said. "There's a large burial ground—"

"Yeah, of lumberjacks, I know," Stanley said. "But that was like this shop—somethin' that just faded in and lasted long enough for me to chase it away."

"More similar than the rock," Ford agreed. "Well, as Stanley says, these manifestations generally don't have the power to last very long. It's likely this one will fade over a few days. Just—just stay away from this corner for the rest of the summer, or until the readings normalize. The same goes for Mabel. I'll do some research and see if I can learn anything about such phenomena. There may be ways of countering them that I can learn about. At any rate, do nothing until you hear from me."

"Got it," Dipper said.

"Listen to him, Dip. He's got like a dozen degrees, and he knows what he's talkin' about. Don't go near the place," Stan said, as if backing up his brother.

"Grunkle Stan," Dipper said, "I won't. I promise you, I won't."

And, at the time, he really meant it.


	2. Chapter 2

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 2: What Dreams May Come**

That night Dipper tossed and turned for hours, unable to sleep, though he had felt tired enough to turn in at nine. He found himself wishing that he and Mabel still shared the attic—he needed somebody to talk to. Or just company. Or, to be honest, a little reassurance that he wasn't being an idiot when he feared what the appearance of the shop might mean.

He got up and paced restlessly, the wooden floor feeling cold under his bare feet. Stared out the window at the dark woods and the distant glows from the scattered lights of the town beyond them. Listened to the Shack creaking as the old timbers settled for the night.

Then at close to one in the morning, the door opened with its familiar creak. "Dipper?"

"Mabel," he said, relief flooding his voice.

"Are you in trouble or something? My twin sense was tingling," she said.

That surprised him. "Really?"

She giggled. "Nah, but I heard you walking around. What's the prob, bro-o-mine?"

He sighed as he sat on his bed. "Just—a lot of stuff on my mind. I couldn't get to sleep."

"Rough night, huh?"

"Yeah, kinda." He said, "So, uh, actually just now I was just, you know, wondering—would you like to have a sleepover?"

She chuckled. "Guess it couldn't hurt. My bed still made up?"

"Except for a blanket. There are some on the top closet shelf."

He heard her open the closet door. He clicked on his bedside lamp and saw her feeling around on the high shelf. "Thanks, Dipper. Got one."

She still wore her faded dusty-blue sleep shirt with the floppy disk on it—her dad had brought it home years before, after attending a computer conference, and he'd never even worn it. Mabel had discovered it in a drawer when she was nine and immediately claimed it as her official nightgown and since then had worn it every single night.

Like Dipper, she had grown in the past year, not enough to completely fill out the baggy shirt, of course, but now the hem ended a little higher along her calf than it had, and the fabric showed that she had, well, more chest than the previous year. She bundled into bed, lay on her side under the blanket, and said, "Tell your sister your troubles, Broseph."

Dipper settled back onto his bed, arms crossed, hands locked behind his head. He was wearing the same shorts and T-shirt he'd had on during the day—though unlike Robbie's accusation the previous year that he always wore the exact same clothes, the truth was that his outfits were all pretty much identical. On the second shelf in the closet he had one pair of pajamas, but he couldn't remember ever wearing them.

He sighed. "I just don't know where to start."

"Then let me make a Mabel guess. Romantic problems with Wendy? Dipper, you _worry_ too much. Just get a clue. You'll be fine if you don't push it too hard, bro. She likes you!"

"Yeah, thanks, I kinda knew that already," Dipper said. "But still she likes me as a friend. Well, a friend she'll sometimes hug and stuff. And, you know, a couple of kisses. There's still our dang age difference."

"It won't matter so much in the FUTURE!" Mabel said dramatically, sitting up in bed and playing imaginary kettle drums. "Bom, bom, BOMMMM! These are the adventures of the future ghost hunter Sir Masonry Dippingsauce, whose eternal mission is to explore strange new feelings, new hugs and new smoochies! To make Wendy fall in love with him! To boldly go where no nerd has gone before!"

"It isn't about Wendy!" Dipper huffed, beginning to regret inviting Mabel in. "It's—well, I shouldn't even tell you."

"Why?"

"Because you'll decide it sounds _adorable_ and you'll get curious and the first thing you know, the whole town will have to go on an expedition to save your butt," Dipper said.

"The whole town? Aw, that's cute!"

"No! No, it isn't cute! Mabel, I'm sorry, but you have to learn to think before jumping into stuff. You think a butterfly is cute and you wind up being imprisoned by a monster! You think fairies are cute, and you nearly get turned into one! Sheesh!"

Mabel lay back down and sighed. "I know, I know, sometimes I'm kinda stupid."

For some reason that made Dipper a little angry. "You are not stupid! Just—just sometimes you get so enthusiastic you go rushing in where maybe you wouldn't if you paused and thought it over."

"Maybe so. But how about _you_? I mean, you went with Grunkle Ford into a wrecked alien spaceship, where there was still dangerous technology ready to take you out! And you even tried to punch Bill Cipher in the eye—"

"Hey, you spritzed him in the eye with spray paint!"

Mabel giggled wildly. "Yeah, that was so much fun!"

Dipper had to laugh. "You know, it really was!"

"Yeah, but then remember, before that you called all those zombies out of the ground right before my big karaoke party? And I was the one who led the charge when we killed 'em all again!"

With a mock groan, Dipper said, "Don't remind me. I still get that song stuck in my head sometimes."

Mabel was laughing again. "'Don't worry, Daddy, got my favorite dress on!' Man, I wish Wendy'd hung around to hear you sing that!"

"Cool it with Wendy, will you?" Dipper pleaded. "I don't go ragging on you about Mermando all the time."

"No," Mabel agreed, sounding subdued. She hadn't had a note from her merman admirer in months now. "I'm sorry, Dip."

Dipper immediately regretted bringing up the subject of the boy—fish—mixture of the two—with whom Mabel had experienced her first kiss. To take her mind off him, he asked, "So . . . hey, are you having any epic romances this summer that I don't know about?"

Mabel lay back and in a thoughtful voice asked, "Did I tell you about William Cheesley?"

Dipper frowned. "Um—that would be the kid who writes fanfic about _Duck-Tective_? He works in the pizza place?"

"Yump! He and I went roller-skating at the Dinky Rink. Kinda fun, except he kept falling on his butt and when we kissed he tasted like pepperoni."

"TMI! I don't want to know about it!"

"Okay. It's not much of an epic romance, anyhow, just that one date. Let me see . . . did I tell you about Bart?"

Dipper turned off his lamp, and darkness flooded the room. "Don't think so."

"Yeah, he and his family got lost driving on a vacation trip to Portland, Maine, because their dad had bought one of those discontinued King-Reiner GPS systems cheap, and so they wound up in Oregon, and they stopped by one day when you were out looking for that woodpecker tree thingy. Bart and I didn't do much, just went for a walk in the woods. He's not my type, anyhow. He's got this weird haircut, and his dad was totally bald and a blimp, and I think the whole family has jaundice or something. Oh, did I mention the vampires?"

"VAMPIRES?"

She giggled again. "Yeah, I still haven't met any. But I have my hopes."

They didn't get around to the subject of the Magick Shop, somehow, but talking in the darkness they felt sleepier and sleepier, and Dipper was vaguely aware that the conversation was taking a few odd turns as he drifted into drowsiness.

In a sleepy, slow voice, Mabel said, "One problem with eating crayons is that when you puke, Gnomes think you're one of them."

Dipper thought about that and then said, "Grunkle Ford wonders why they don't take off their caps. He thinks Gnomes must have naturally pointy heads."

Mabel yawned. "Pencils have points."

Dipper caught the yawn from her, but when he could, he replied, "Yeah, but you'd, you know, I mean a thousand pencils wouldn't ever kidnap you."

Mabel murmured, "I dunno. If a bunch of goofballs—I mean golf balls—could—um. You know, I heard a kid who'd played mini-golf at the Putt Hutt singing a weird song about, um. Some guy named Big Henry, who suffocated in a mine or something. Kid said he heard it coming out of one of the holes."

"Big Henry, huh? Big. Ha! He must've been a softball."

"That's a stupid name for a softball. I'd call him Softy."

"Soos said he was gonna sing us one of the folk songs peopled wrote about him during Weirdmageddon, but first he says he has to buy a banjo and learn to play it."

"Fiddleford can play the banjo."

"So can Kermit. You know, on TV."

"I liked the babies better."

The conversation gradually glided aimlessly out onto the waters of surrealism, and the next thing Dipper knew he was dreaming—no, really, he actually realized that he was in a dream, one of those lucid dreams, when you know that you're dreaming, but you don't wake up because, hey, you're already asleep and it's too much trouble and besides you'd kind of like to know how it turns out.

Except that Dipper had a sting of a small chilling thought, just for an instant, almost instantly forgotten:

 _Oh no. Here I am in the Mindscape._

He, or his dream self, was looking for something, or for someone, but what it was his observing self couldn't guess.

Dipper wandered in some dark space until a blue light flickered on and he saw that he was in the forest bunker, near the cryogenic tube where they'd frozen the Shapeshifter, which had taken on his own form. It was still trapped in the tube, an ice sculpture the form of a screaming Dipper.

"Hey man," said a familiar voice, because it was his own. "Lost something?"

Without physically moving, Dipper now stood out in the forest someplace. He looked beside him and smiled. "Tyrone! I thought you'd melted, man."

The shorter, paler copy of him rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, yeah, I did, but in here anything's possible, you know?"

Dipper frowned. "So—you _are_ dead, though, right?"

Tyrone shrugged. "Dead, alive, who knows? Hey, I've been wanting to know, how're things going with Wendy?"

Dipper smiled. "We've danced together. And I kissed her. And she kissed me back. Funny, I didn't even draw up a plan this time."

Tyrone's grin nearly split his face. "You da man!" He held out his hand for a fist bump.

And Dipper felt as if he wanted to shrink away to nothing. Reluctantly, he muttered, "Tyrone—I shouldn't have said it like that. I hate it when guys boast about, you know, their girls and stuff."

"I don't understand that," Tyrone said, "but you're older than I am, and hey, I'm you anyway. So indulge a little kid." He still held his fist out.

"OK." Dipper gave him his fist bump. "I think—I'm here because I'm looking for Mabel."

"Haven't seen her around lately, but good luck." Tyrone turned into a wispy blue cloud shaped like himself, and then blew away on an unfelt breeze.

For some reason—and without physically moving—Dipper then stood in the churchyard of St. Mathias' Catholic Church, outside the city limits. He remembered recently standing there when Soos's father was buried. Someone was at his elbow. "Sad, Dipper?"

He looked to the side. "Oh, hi, Pacifica. Well, no, not really, I guess. I'm just trying to find Mabel. Why are you only wearing underwear?"

She stared at him, her expression as huffy as her voice: "It's very expensive underwear! Don't you like it?"

"Well, it would look fine in a store, but in public, you know—"

Her smile changed to that _nghyaa_! face she always made when upset. "Oh!" she said in an annoyed way. "Don't you even realize you have, like, a dream girl available to you right here _in_ a dream, where you can do, like _anything_?"

"I didn't mean to make you mad—"

"You are _so_ immature!" She turned and stalked away as though angry, but with each step she sank gradually into the ground until she vanished, which for some reason seemed absolutely normal.

He stood in the cemetery—no, now he was somewhere else, in a clearing deep in the woods—and listened to the endless tapping of woodpeckers. Then—it had been too faint to understand—but he thought he heard his sister saying something. "Mabel?"

"Dipper," crooned Mabel's voice. "Here I am!"

He turned around and was not surprised to see a shiny wooden coffin lying on the ground. "Get out of there!"

"Ugh! Can't. Lid's too heavy."

With an annoyed sigh, Dipper leaned down and took hold of the edge of the lid. It was an old-fashioned coffin, the kind you see in black-and-white horror movies, six-sided, widening out where the shoulders of an adult would be. It seemed to be made of some highly polished, dark-brown, close-grained wood—mahogany, maybe—with a bright silver cross inlaid in the top center. "It's not heavy at all."

Dipper flipped the lid over easily, and Mabel sat up. "'Bout time."

"Get out of there—if someone catches you—what are you doing hiding there, anyway?"

She was terribly pale, and she gave him a hurt look. "You put me in here, brobro! Don't you remember? It was the summer when we were thirteen. You put me in and closed the lid on me, with that heavy silver thing that I can't even move, and I've been waiting here in the dark ever since."

"What are you talking about? When we were thirteen? We're still only—my gosh, what's happened to me?"

His hand went to his face. It felt strangely elongated, and his chin bristled with a small scruffy beard, and he realized belatedly that he had been a lot taller than both Tyrone and Pacifica. "Mabel! What's wrong with me?"

"Life," she said, with a sad, sympathetic smile. "Poor Dipper. But I can cure that." She grinned, and he saw the razor-sharp curves of her canines. "It won't hurt you much," she said. "And then you and I will be together forever."

"You're a _vampire!_ "

"Sure, brobro!" she chirped, grinning to show her fangs. "Hey, you ruined the very last sweater I ever wore! See?" It was a red sweater with the image of Dipper's face knitted into it, but it had been badly mutilated. "Big hole in it almost over my heart! But you missed by an inch. It took me five long years to pull that stupid stake out. Hey, how's Waddles?"

"Mabel, something's wrong. I'm still just thirteen! This is a dream!"

"You've gone all cray-cray in the head since Wendy died," Mabel said kindly.

"I'm not— _wait, what_?"

Mabel smiled sweetly, despite her sharp fangs. "You'll have eternity to get over losing her. I'll fix you up."

She leaped onto him, and only then did Dipper realize he stood at least six feet tall—Mabel was only about four feet tall herself. She clung to him and clambered up his chest, baring her fangs. Her breath in his face smelled like moldy earth. She crooned, "Be still. You'll like living forever, and this only hurts once," and holding him tight, she crunched her sharp teeth into his carotid artery—

Dipper's eyes flew open wide in darkness. _Oh, no, I'm in a coffin!_ He stuck his arms out straight and then realized it wasn't completely dark. A full moon lit the triangular window in—oh, yes, in the attic room of the Shack.

Still, with shaking hands, Dipper felt his chin to make sure he hadn't sprouted a beard. Nope. Just his chin with its usual couple of zits. They'd started during the winter at school—not a nasty case, and his mother had told him that Mabel and he got "good skin" from her side of the family, so he hoped he wouldn't start to look like a badly made pizza—

Pizza guy. What had Mabel said? Breath smelled like pepperoni, but Mabel's breath—

Vampire Mabel!

 _Oh, man, what a freaking crazy dream._

Mabel lay in the other bed, just as she always had the previous summer. He could tell because she was snoring in her peculiar musical way. And a snuffly little grunt told Dipper that at some point she'd let Waddles in, though these days the pig was really uncomfortably large for the room—too big to share a bed, so he spread out on a blanket on the floor where from time to time a sleepy Mabel could reach down to scratch his ears.

Dipper kept running over and over the imagery of the dream. Why had Mabel said he'd put her in the coffin? He'd ruined her sweater? He'd— _Oh, my gosh, she turned into a vampire and I staked her!_

"I wouldn't do that!" he whispered, clenching his hands. He felt beads of sweat creeping on his forehead like slow ants. "I'd find some other way to, to fix her. And she told me that Wendy—Wendy had died!"

 _It's not true, it's not true, it's a bad dream, that's all._

He tried to be logical about it. There was what had recently happened—Soos learning that his long-missing father had died in the charity ward of a hospital in Vancouver. His trip up to Canada and back to return the body, and the Catholic funeral they had all attended. Then Wendy had taken them to visit her mother's grave, and Dipper had put a marker out in Creepy Hollow for his copies, even Paper Jam Dipper—

 _Too much dwelling on death_ , he decided. And then that stupid shop had appeared, and _that_ had him all on edge.

He felt so sweaty that he slipped out of bed and rummaged in the closet by feel until on the second shelf he found the folded pajamas he never wore. He slipped out into the hall and into the bathroom, undressed, staring at his reflection in the mirror—to his relief, still a thirteen-year-old, slightly zitted Dipper with, hey, four hairs on his chest now—and quickly sponged off the worst of the sweat, then toweled dry. He pulled the pajamas on and buttoned them.

Huh. He'd never really paid them much attention before. His parents had given them to him as a Christmas gift—well, not both his parents, but, he knew full well, his mother. _That's Mom,_ he thought. _Always dress for the occasion. Keep a list so you won't forget. Organize and manage your time! And always give practical gifts._

But he'd barely looked at the pajamas before. He knew they were a dark blue, and so they were—a midnight blue.

However, they were dotted white. Not polka-dots, he realized, which might have been girly, but small dots that looked like, yes, a spangle of stars. In the mirror he saw the jacket chest reversed. Across it spread the white dots, corresponding to the stars that made up—

"The Big Dipper," Dipper said softly. "Aw, Mom!" When the kids in preschool had started mocking him with his nickname, she was the first family member—not Mabel, but Mom—to pick it up and use it endearingly. At first it had annoyed him, but now he liked it better than his real name. Especially since Wendy thought it was kind of cool.

"Alkaid," he murmured, naming the stars. "Mizar, Alioth, Magrez, Dubhe, Merak, Phecda. All together, they make up the stars of Ursa Major. AKA 'The Plough,' or 'King Charles's Wain.' The Greeks, Romans, and Jews all called it the Great Bear. And, oh, yeah, so did the Iroquois. The Japanese told a legend of—huh."

Dipper stared at the mirror image of the constellation in the mirror.

The Japanese told of seven brothers who gave their lives protecting their sisters. Their souls became the stars of the Big Dipper.

Brothers who . . . sacrificed their lives . . . for their sisters.

"Just a legend," Dipper assured his reflection. He turned off the bathroom light and tiptoed back to the bedroom. Waddles snuffled sleepily. Dipper groped on his bedside table, found his phone, plugged in and charging, and turned it on. Three A.M.

That seemed appropriate.

 _In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning_.

Somewhere he had read that or heard that—English class, maybe?

Trying to remember, Dipper drifted back into sleep. This time he dreamed again, but nothing quite as—unsettling.

Instead, he dreamed of an arched door frame—in the night itself, no house around it, just a door cut into the darkness.

A splintery, ancient-looking door slowly opened inward, away from him.

A little way into the arched opening, standing in a kind of visible gloom was—someone tall and thin, shrouded in a gray hooded cape that billowed and pulsed as though lifted from below by hot rising air.

Beneath the hood, the shadowy figure's face could not be made out. But a chalk-white, long-fingered hand rose, the sleeve billowing around the thin arm, and beckoned to him as the figure whispered, "Come in. Come in. I have answers . . . for sale."


	3. Chapter 3

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 3: All in Your Mind**

"C'mon, Dipper! Keep it up! Man, what's _wrong_ with you this morning?"

Gasping as he put one heavy foot in front of the other and then did it again, Dipper gave Wendy a brief, apologetic smile. "Didn't—didn't get much—much sleep last night," he panted.

"Well, keep up with me. Winding down now, dude. We're nearly back to the Shack," she said, loping easily beside him, her long legs flashing as she ran, her red hair blowing in the breeze. _Oh, man, those tight running shorts!_

"Try to!" They were thirty-some minutes into a forty-minute run, and Dipper knew his speed that morning wasn't as good as it had been just the day before. He'd toughed it out through a severe stitch in his side—and at last that had faded—but now his legs were beginning to feel leaden and to wobble under him. He was gasping, too, the air burning his lungs.

Showing some compassion, Wendy slowed a little and said, "Okay, we'll cool down a little. But don't stop. You can do it, Dip. Don't give up on me, man!"

"Never!" he said, hoping he was showing spirit rather than plain old desperation. He forced himself to run a little faster, though he thought _I'm gonna go sprawling on my face any second now! That or puke! Or both at once!_

They were on the Mystery Shack drive now, and ahead of them lay the parking lot and the rambling Shack itself, a mess of original cabin, tacked-on rooms, and random side structures. In the morning sun, the triangular window in the attic gleamed like—well, like Bill Cipher, his eye staring down at them balefully.

 _Bill's gone. This has nothing to do with Bill!_

True, Dipper had found the Bill stone a few days before, when he'd been roaming the woods in search of that elusive woodpecker-consuming tree. The triangular form had startled him at first—but then he remembered how it had all ended, with Bill jubilantly leaping out of his pyramidal corporeal form and into what he mistakenly thought to be Stanford's mind.

The misjudgment had cost Bill dominion over our universe, and—probably—his life. It was difficult to ascertain the exact state of existence of multidimensional non-corporeal entities with a Napoleonic complex.

Anyway, that stone effigy had been the only physical remnant of Bill Cipher—and today it stood partly buried in the forest soil, with grass sprouting all around it. It was cracked and lichens were spreading their slow way on it, and a pair of small birds, Anna's Hummingbirds, had built a miniscule cuplike nest, no bigger in diameter than a quarter, on the very top of the tall stone hat.

Dipper had left the stone figure standing and undisturbed. He had not wanted to touch it or even approach it—and nothing in the world would have made him grasp its outstretched stick-figure hand.

But no, whatever was robbing him of sleep right now had nothing to do with—

"Forty minutes. Now walk it out!" Wendy said beside him, and Dipper came back to some semblance of consciousness, realizing that they were slowing to a walk about halfway to the Shack. "I'm proud of you, Dipper. You didn't give up."

They walked the rest of the way, cooling off. Then Dipper let himself collapse face-down onto the grass. It needed a trim, which would probably be his job later that day. Right now, though, it felt soft and welcoming and smelled wonderful and fresh. If he'd been Mabel, he would have cheered, "Yay, grass!" and rolled in it, but that would have taken energy he didn't feel he had, and besides, he wasn't Mabel. "Try to do better tomorrow," he managed to tell Wendy, turning his head so he could speak.

Wendy hunkered down on the grass next to him and rubbed his back. "You got moxie, Dip! You know, now that we've got you broke in, it's actually bad training to go seven days a week straight. From now on we'll take two days a week off, OK? Let you recoup some of your stamina in between sessions. But we won't take the same two days off, just so's we keep your body on its toes, and they won't be consecutive. So this week, like, Wednesday off and then maybe Sunday. Next week, Tuesday and Saturday, and we'll back it up through the weeks. But I warn you, if you slack off even a tiny bit, we'll go back to seven a week!"

"I won't slack off," he promised, his voice a little shaky. _She's touching me! She's rubbing my shoulders! Aggh! It's happening! I don't dare roll over right now. Maybe if I stay on my stomach it'll go away._ "But I think I just need to lay here a little bit," he continued. "Uh, catch my breath, you know?"

"'Kay, dude. I'm gonna run in and grab a quick shower, then change for work. You gonna hang around the Shack today, or go out on some mystery quest again?"

"Don't know yet," Dipper said. "Probably stay here at least through noon. I'll have some yard work to catch up on. I'll let you know the rest of my plans when I find out if I can walk again."

She laughed and said, "Good deal!" Giving him a final encouraging pat on the back, she rose and went inside the Shack. Dipper lay still for a few more minutes until his problem had grown less rampant, and then he pushed himself up, slogged inside, showered, and changed for the day. Mabel had slept in and was just sitting down to breakfast when he came downstairs again. She was yawning and rubbing sleep from her eyes. "Morning," she said.

"Good morning," he returned.

She shook her head. "Nope. Nothing good about it. Just 'Morning.' Broman, why do you do this to yourself? Stay up all night, then get up before the sun—no wonder you have those big bags under your eyes."

"These aren't bags, OK?"

Mabel snorted. "Hah! You could pack for a trip to Bermuda with those bags!"

"No," he insisted. "They're just stress lines. And I get them because I worry about stuff."

Mabel looked at him with concern. "Yeah, you really do, bro. You haven't been contacting any more demons, have you? 'Cause I'm almost out of sock puppets."

"Bill wasn't a demon," Dipper said as he sat down with a bowl and reached for the box of Crunchy Banshee cereal ("So good you'll SCREEEEEAAAMMM for more!") and then the milk. "He was a being from another dimension."

"Yeah, who wanted to like _destroy_ our world! And make all humans slaves. Why would an all-powerful interdimensional creature even _want_ humans?" Mabel gasped. "Wait a minute! _I'm_ a human! That's it! Bill did it all because he was secretly in love with me!"

"Way to make it all about yourself, Sis," Dipper said around a mouthful of crackly banshee-shaped cereal pieces. "Uh—" _What had Wendy told him? "Dude, you and Mabel aren't as close since you're not sharin' a room any more. Try to talk to her more—and listen to her."_

Even this morning, when every muscle ached and he felt as if any second he might flop face-down from sheer exhaustion and drown in his cereal bowl, having fallen fatally asleep? Make an effort to listen to Mabel? Really?

Yeah, really. Wendy had advised it. So Dipper said, "Uh, so what've you got planned for today, Mabel?"

"Planned! Hah!" Mabel sprayed a few soggy fragments of cereal when she laughed. "Don't you know me better than that? When do I ever plan stuff? I'm random Mabel! Random! Random! Random!"

"O-kay," Dipper said, wiping his face with a paper napkin. "So you're just gonna do, uh, random stuff? Want me to join in?"

"Aw, Dipper!" Mabel said in a softer tone. "Sure, that'd be great. Let's go play a few holes of golf after breakfast, and then Mabel will come up with some idea that we both will love!"

"Mini-golf right after I mow the lawn," he said. "I want to do that before it gets really hot."

Mabel cheerfully volunteered to help—she took the power mower, he took the old rotary push model—and they had both side yards tamed in about forty minutes. The back yard, in the shade of the forest trees, grew more slowly, so they gave it a pass. Mabel brought down a couple of beat-up golf balls and the putters, and they played nine quick holes. "You slaughtered me—as usual," Dipper said, totaling up the score. Twelve to twenty-two. How do you get all those holes in one, anyhow?"

Mabel shrugged. "Mm-uh. Just talent and practice." She grinned, leaning on her putter. "Uh-oh. I hear tourists coming!"

It was a little early for tourists, and sure enough, the car that rolled in proved to be Grunkle Stan's El Diablo, with both of their great-uncles in it. They got out, arguing as usual. Stanford said, "Stanley, you absolutely ran the red light!"

"Did not! It was clearly yellow right up until the hood ornament was directly under it!"

"But then it was red when the rest of the car went through the intersection!"

"Close don't count except in horseshoes, Ford!—Oh, hi, knuckleheads. How's it hangin'?"

"We just mowed the lawn!" Mabel told him. "Now Gompers is processing the clippings into mulch. That's a funny word! Mulch!"

Ford said, "Dipper, I think I have good news for you. Want to walk and talk?"

Well, no, not really, mostly because his legs felt as if someone had been whopping them with plastic baseball bats and the walking part was problematic, but he did want to talk, and so he said, "Sure."

They strolled out on the Mystery Trail that Stan had cut through the woods, where he showed tourists the strange and unique features of the Gravity Falls Forest, like the old and disused Outhouse of Mystery, which had the disconcerting habit of letting you out—after your private business had been settled—at a weird time. You might, for example, come out an hour before you went in. Then if you didn't return to it an hour later, horrible, unthinkable things happened to your digestive system. More usually, though, you'd come out an hour or two later that it should have been, which last summer had once prompted Stan to yell at him: "What are you _doin'_ in there? Don't answer, you're a boy—I know!"

The other sights were perhaps less disgusting but not so very strange and weird, except to gullible tourists. When they had passed the outhouse, Ford said, "I re-checked the location of your magick-shop phenomenon this morning, Dipper, and the readings are down to normal, just a little background instability. No more than I'd find at the Shack, though."

"So—it's safe for me to go to the Arcade now?"

"I don't see why not. However, if the magic shop shows up again—by the way, how was the sign spelled?"

"M-A-G-I-C-K S-H-O-P."

"Hm. That figures. Well, at least it's not as bad as it could be. The 'K' shows us that the proprietor, whatever it may be, follows the Thelema Society convention of spelling the word with a final 'k' to differentiate it from sleight of hand and stage conjuring. The 'k' spelling is supposed to connote the real stuff. However, the fact that 'shop' is normally spelled is reason to think the proprietor may not be thoroughly evil."

"Uh—I don't understand." That was a confession Dipper did not often make—even when it was true—and speaking about his uncertainty even to his great-uncle Ford took some effort.

Ford shrugged. "Well, it could have been spelled 'S-H-O-P-P-E.'"

"Oh. And that would mean—?"

Grimly, Ford replied, "That the proprietor was not only unfathomably evil, but insufferably twee. The worst-case scenario, though, would be if the sign read 'Ye Olde Magick Shoppe.' That would be the mark of a truly sick, diabolical, and twisted mind. There's only one thing to do in a case like that."

"What?"

"Call Stanley in and have him burn it down."

Dipper gave a weak chuckle.

"However, I was saying if the shop shows up again, call me right away."

"Sure," Dipper said. "I will. Uh—could I talk to you about some weird dreams?"

Ford smiled at him. "Certainly. You can talk to me about anything. Oh, except for dancing and grasshoppers. I never learned to dance, and grasshoppers scare me."

"No dancing or grasshoppers," Dipper said, grinning. Then his expression became worried. "But, Grunkle Ford, a whole lot of death."

They sat on the log in the bonfire clearing while Dipper stumbled through a summary of his nightmare. Ford did not interrupt—nor did he look amused, or superior, or as if he were thinking of something else. That was, maybe, the biggest difference between him and Grunkle Stan: Ford always talked and listened to Dipper as one adult to another and never goofed around and joked at times when that might have made him feel uncomfortable.

"I see," Ford said thoughtfully when Dipper wound up his account. "Well, my first reaction is that your judgment was probably right when you thought that the funeral last week, together with your visiting the other grave sites, got you in that frame of mind. And there's Mabel's joking about wanting to date a vampire—"

"I . . . don't think she's joking," Dipper said.

Ford shrugged. "Perhaps not. She can be—indiscriminately enthusiastic in her pursuit of romance. However, in my experience true vampires are exceptionally rare, even in Gravity Falls. And if you do run across them, they tend to be saturnine and serious individuals who don't value levity. Speaking frankly, Dipper, I think Mabel's effect on a typical vampire would be roughly that of holding up a cross in one hand and a couple of cloves of garlic in the other."

"I hope so," Dipper muttered. "You know the weirdest thing? When I thought _she_ was a vampire, and she jumped on me and bit my throat and I felt the puncture—well—Grunkle Ford, I—I kind of liked it!"

"That's the attraction of darkness," Ford said solemnly. "Believe me, I've felt the same thing. Those of us who explore the boundaries of mystery, who look great evil in the face and spurn it—we often feel a sneaking desire to give in to it. It's a kind of lure that we know we can't surrender to. Resist it. Be strong, Dipper. And, if I may make a suggestion, get your mind off mysteries and darkness and death for a few days. I think that will improve your mood more than you'd believe possible. Take a leaf from Mabel's book and just be silly and have fun. For example, I recently noticed a poster in the grocer's window stating that there's a dance on Friday evening in the teen center. Why not take Wendy?"

Dipper gave him a dubious glance. "I though you didn't know anything about dancing."

Ford laughed. "Well, in the sense that I can't give you instructions! But Wendy would enjoy it, and you'd be surprised how much better it might make you feel just to have one fun evening with someone you really like."

"I'll do it," Dipper told him.

* * *

Half an hour later, standing in the doorway of the gift shop, he told himself, _I can't do it!_

Wendy sat behind the counter, busily ringing up purchases—a couple of carloads of tourists had invaded the shop—and Soos in his Mr. Mystery garb and Grunkle Stan in his Hawaiian shirt were encouraging the customers to buy more merch. Ford had run into a forty-ish man who'd opened the conversation with "You know, this area has a sort of vibe to it. I didn't think there were any eerie places like this anywhere but in Indiana!"

"Oh? You're from Indiana?" Ford asked, sounding interested.

"Yes. Well, not originally, but I moved to a small, weird town there when I was a teen, and man, you wouldn't believe the strange things that I saw there."

"I'm Dr. Stanford Pines," Ford said, shaking the man's hand.

"My name's Teller."

"And what you said about my unbelief is not necessarily true. I study anomalies. Come and sit on the porch and tell me about your experiences."

And now they were out there chatting away a mile a minute.

After nearly three-quarters of an hour, the last tourist, clutching a big Mystery Shack shopping bag crammed with gewgaws, knickknacks, tchotchkes, and thingumabobs, smiled her way out of the shop, and Dipper nervously walked up to Wendy. "Busy, huh?"

"Tell me about it," she said, leaning back and rolling her eyes. "Whenever he's here, Stan, like, nearly breaks their arms to get them to buy. And he'll tell 'em, 'Why purchase just one chupacabra skull when you can get a second one half off? Think of what you could do with a pair!' And they, like, buy two! What _can_ you do with a pair of chupacabra skulls?"

"Good point, good point," Dipper said. He coughed. "Ah—you know, or maybe you haven't heard yet, but there's a dance in the Center this Friday night. Or so I hear. So, I was kind of wondering, you know—"

Wendy raised her eyebrows and smiled at him in that way that made him feel everything inside his skin was melting. "Yeah?"

"I mean, we'd miss our movie night, you know, so maybe it's a bad idea, but then I was just thinking, and it won't upset me or anything if you don't want to, but—" _Oh, man, I'm blowing it! Gotta stop babbling like an idiot! Say it. SAY IT!_ He took a deep breath. "I don't suppose you'd want to go with me?"

"Yeah, sure," Wendy said. "It's a date, dude."

Dipper ducked his head. "Well, that's OK anyway—wait, what?"

"I'll go with you, man."

His head had snapped back up, and for a second he stared at her with his mouth open. Then he smiled. "Oh. Uh. Great! Uh, Wendy? It's OK with me if when we're there you, you know, want to dance with other guys your age who're there and all. I'm not much good at dancing, I know that, and—"

"Dipper, stop talkin' yourself down, dude! We'll go and dance we'll have fun. I'll drive. Nobody's gonna judge you for actin' crazy on the dance floor! Everybody does it! If anybody tells us we're a weird couple, we'll smile and agree and just ignore them. And, hey, if it embarrasses you to have me drive you, we'll park around the corner and walk to the Center, OK?"

"It doesn't embarrass me," Dipper said, feeling oddly as if he wanted to cry. "Well. It's a, uh, it's—it's a date. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go outside and scream for a little while now."

Wendy laughed. "Just don't get itchy, man."

"I won't," he promised, finally grinning without forcing it.

He stepped out into the sunlight. A tour bus was just pulling in, and as the crowd spilled out, he called out cheerfully to them: "Hi, welcome to the Mystery Shack! Hey, have a great time, ma'am! You're gonna love this place. Take some souvenirs home! Kids, be sure to take the Mystery Trail tour! Tell 'em Dipper sent you! Enjoy!"

He chuckled as he watched them all crowd in. Then he spotted Mabel, out at the fringe of the woods, picking wildflowers, and walked over to her. "Hi, Sis. Hey, want to see the smallest bird nest in the world?"

Her eyes got big and round. "Does it have adorable birds in it?"

"Well, actually, I think the young ones have grown up and flown away. But the nest is so tiny, you won't believe it. Only one thing: It's stuck on top of the petrified Bill Cipher."

Mabel puffed out her cheeks and made her tongue go _Pfbbbbbt!_ "I've seen _that_ before. I'm not afraid of _that_!"

Dipper chuckled. "You're not afraid of anything."

"Nope. And neither are you. Mystery Twins!"

They fist-bumped. Dipper thought fleetingly about telling Mabel of his upcoming, incredible, very real, actual first date ever—but no, he didn't want to boast. Maybe he could simply mention the dance in a casual way and possibly Mabel could find a date, too.

Shouldn't be hard. She had two days. In that time Mabel could run through at least four potential romances.

So he brought it up, and she enthusiastically said she was sure she could find some boy to escort her, or better yet, she'd go alone and that way she'd have her pick of the wall-leaners. "There's always a ton of shy boys waiting at the edges. And that's where Mabel goes trawling for hotties!" she announced.

Dipper encouraged her, thinking what a surprise it would be for her to spot him and Wendy out on the dance floor. They walked down the path, around the Bottomless Pit, and through the woods laughing and chattering and it was like old times.

 _This is more like it,_ Dipper thought. _The mysterious shop is gone, Mabel's her old self, the sun is shining. And Wendy's going on a date! With me!_

 _Maybe I've turned a corner._

 _Maybe everything will be fine._


	4. Chapter 4

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 4: Disguises**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Wednesday, July 24—It's nearly three in the afternoon, and after a grueling trek in the woods, today I can report that I have finally spotted the Venus Woodpecker Trap Tree._

 _I think._

 _It's actually impossible to be sure, since I don't know what it's supposed to look like, but after I witnessed—wait a minute, let me tell this in some kind of order. First, I can see the tree from here, and I know my exact location. I used the GPS on my phone to take a latitude and longitude reading, and I saved it, and this evening I'll transfer the information over to my scientific journal and maybe great-uncle Ford will come with me and confirm my observations._

 _But I'm getting ahead of myself. Since we skipped the calisthenics and run this morning, I set out extra early, not even waiting for breakfast. I just slapped together a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, poured milk into my canteen, and ate as I walked into the woods._

 _It occurred to me that maybe the way to find a woodpecker-eating tree is not to look for the tree, but for woodpeckers. There are plenty of them around this summer, and I've seen several different subspecies. At about nine o'clock this morning I was deep in the woods, maybe three or four miles from the Shack, when I spotted a young Northern Flicker. I recognized it from its tawny-gold back, barred with black scalloped lines. It had a black throat, a long, slightly curved bill, and two red patches on its cheeks that made me think of Mabel._

 _Now, these Flickers aren't like most other woodpeckers, because they tend to feed on the ground, picking up worms and ants. But they also will search for grubs by pecking on trees and like all the other woodpeckers, they peck out cavities in tree trunks and nest in there._

 _As I watched, it soon became clear that there were several of them around, all about the same age. I guessed they had hatched from the same clutch of eggs. I followed the first one I saw as it went deeper into the forest. Whenever it landed in underbrush, I lost sight of it, but I soon learned that if I just froze in position and waited, sooner or later it would fly up from the ground again._

 _I got very tired of following that bird. It didn't seem to know where it wanted to go. Several times I heard other woodpeckers drumming, but the sound didn't seem to impress the Flicker. It was already well past noon when I started to think about giving up. I was lost—though with my phone GPS, I could find my way back eventually—and even in the shade of the woods it was a hot day._

 _Then I came to a gully that I couldn't jump and that looked hard to cross. I'd have to scramble down and then climb up the steep opposite side. The stupid bird flew right across and then landed on the trunk of a tree on the far side of the gully, about fifty or sixty feet away. I could hear a cheeping sound, and then I realized there was a hole in the trunk up about thirty feet off the ground. The Flicker climbed up, seemed to look at the hole and make up its little bird brain, and then it perched on the edge of the hole._

 _I thought it was visiting the nest it came from but then—poof! The Flicker was gone, sucked inside the hole, leaving only a few feathers drifting in the air._

 _AND THEN THE HOLE CLOSED UP!_

 _I couldn't find a way to get across for a better look, but I recorded the coordinates for where I was and took about a dozen pictures of the tree, zooming in as much as I could. A woodpecker-eating tree, disguised as—well as another kind of tree. I don't know the species._

 _But the hole closed up, and I couldn't even tell where it had been._

 _I can't identify the tree. I'll ask Wendy to look at the picture. She'll know._

 _Now I've been sitting here on a rock for nearly two hours, and no other woodpecker has come around. The hole hasn't opened back up, anyhow. And I can't find another tree that looks like this one. I wish I'd been taking a video when the Flicker got gulped so I could show great-uncle Ford what I saw._

 _But maybe in the next day or two we can both come back to the spot and confirm my discovery. If we're the first to describe it, we can name it after us!_

 _I'm thinking,_ Picuscomenti pinus. _That, I believe, means "Pines's Woodpecker Eater." But maybe I'm wrong, because I haven't had Latin in school, just looked up some on the web. But if I got it wrong, great-uncle Ford will know, and he'll correct it._

 _Now I have to find my way back through the woods and tell everyone the news!_

* * *

"Dipper!" Wendy said when he walked in at half-past four that afternoon, a little sunburned, tired, and hungry. "Where've you been, man? We've been looking all over for you, and you weren't answerin' your phone."

"Oh. Shoot, I guess I turned off the ringer and forgot to turn it back on—didn't want the phone to go off and spook the birds. I was out in the woods," he explained, holding up the Journal in which he'd recorded his sighting. "You'll never believe what I found—"

But Wendy had her phone out and was texting, thumb flicking with the speed of a hummingbird's wings. "Hang on, dude. And . . . send. There, I just texted Mabel that you finally got home. We have to put together a costume for you, Dip!"

Dipper hopped up on the counter and sat there. He said, "Well, I've been looking for this tree for days, and—what do you mean, 'costume'?"

"For the dance," Wendy said, leaning her chin on her palm and propping her elbow on the counter next to him. He could smell her fragrance—never sweet or flowery, but always fresh and just a tad minty, like the air in the woods. She chuckled at his puzzled expression. "Oh, man, don't tell me you asked me to go to it and didn't even know what it's gonna be!"

"Um—no?" Dipper said, beginning to feel the touch of panic. "It—we don't have to wear, like, Halloween costumes, or—"

"I thought you could wear your 'lamby-lamby' getup," Wendy said seriously, and then laughed when he involuntarily grimaced. "I'm just kiddin', man! But straight up, it's gonna be a nostalgia dance" She laughed again. "Oh, Dip, you won't believe it! Robbie's band is gonna play there—can you imagine them coverin', like, a Beatles or Stones tune? But Stan says every time they play four old songs, they can throw in one of their own, so—"

Dipper blinked, feeling as if he'd gone down some unsuspected rabbit hole in reality. "Stan as in Grunkle Stan? Why would he have anything to say about it?"

"Dude, he's the promoter!" Wendy said, reaching down to retrieve a poster from under the counter. She passed it to him. "See, 'Pines Premiere Productions?' He put together the whole thing—a live band, Soos to DJ for other tunes, and the theme is "Back in Time." You gotta come dressed like a kid from the sixties, or one from the nineties dressed as if he was nostalgic for the fifties, or whatever!"

Dipper made a face. "Do we really have to dress up like that?"

"C'mon, man," she said, playfully punching his arm. "It'll be fun! There's gonna be prizes for the best costumes, and you'd feel funny if you showed up and were the only one not in, like, old-timey clothes."

"Well . . . OK, I guess. But Grunkle Stan is getting paid for this?" Dipper asked. _What a stupid question. Of course he is!_

Wendy shrugged. "Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, tickets are seven-fifty if you're stag, or ten bucks for a couple, and there'll probably be at least a couple hundred people there—teens, but a lot of adults, too, 'cuz nostalgia is like some big thing with them. And Stan gets a cut of the concessions and all. He's payin' Robbie and his group a couple hundred, and a hundred to Soos, so I guess he keeps the rest of it. Teen center's letting him use the space rent-free, as long as he cleans up afterward."

"Uh-huh. That means me and Mabel clean up," Dipper said.

"Well, I'll pitch in too, and Soos. It won't be so bad, and dressin' up will be kinda fun."

"Uh—well, if you want to, sure. What, what are you gonna wear?"

"Oh, no," Wendy told him with a smug little grin. "It's gonna be a surprise. But Mabel swears I'm gonna look cute and you're gonna be dreamy."

 _Maybe I could make it into town for the six o'clock bus back to Piedmont._ But Dipper swallowed hard. "I guess it's all right, then. Where's Mabel?"

"She was goin' into town to shop," Wendy said. "That's why she was looking for you, Dip."

"Yeah, she needed a beast of burden," Dipper said.

"Needed your measurements, too, but she checked the labels in your clothes, so—that's prob'ly her." Wendy's phone beeped, and she checked the screen. "Yup, it's Mabes. She's comin' back on the bus. Now, promise me, Dipper, you'll cooperate with her when she designs your outfit."

"Yeah, OK, but I want to have the right of veto if it's dumb."

"It won't be dumb!"

"Huh," he said. " _She's_ the one who loves the lamb suit!"

* * *

A couple of hours later, Soos, Melody, and Soos's Abuelita waited expectantly in the parlor. From upstairs Mabel called, "Everybody ready for the big reveal?"

"Oh, yeah, dawg!" Soos yelled back. "Can't wait!"

"First," Mabel said, "we present . . . Greaser Dipper! Or as we call him, Gripper!"

"Mabel!"

"Go on, mah brother! Your public awaits."

Dipper came downstairs with a sort of sick grin on his face. He stood at the bottom and shrugged. "Well . . . here I am."

"You look great, dude!" Soos said.

"Really nice! Turn around so we can see the back," Melody urged.

"His hair is so oily," Abuelita said.

"Uh, yeah, that's, that's kinda the idea," Dipper muttered, turning slowly. He wore a black faux-leather jacket with a turned-up collar over a white T-shirt, tight jeans that ended six inches above his ankles, white socks, and two-tone patent-leather shoes, white over black. Across the back of the jacket, in gleaming silver studs, Mabel had placed the legend "Rock N Roll."

Dipper turned all the way around and shrugged again. "And now Soda Fountain Mabel," he said without much real enthusiasm. "Does my birthmark look too weird with this or what?"

"Shut up, Gripper!" Mabel called from upstairs. "Announce me again!"

So Dipper did, and Mabel bopped down the stairs. She wore a white short-sleeved top with her name embroidered above her heart, a pink satin hat, a non-functional lacy white apron over a pink satin skirt, and white patent boots. "I'm a carhop!" she announced. "Hop! Hop!"

"Very nice!" Melody said, clapping.

"A carhop doesn't actually act like a kangaroo," Dipper muttered.

"Aw, dude, that's so authentic it makes me hungry!" Soos announced.

Abuelita asked, "Why is his hair so oily?"

Mabel announced, "And now, here comes teen heart-throb Wendy! Come on down!"

"Wow," Dipper said. This was the first time he'd actually seen the girls' costumes.

Wendy was . . . stunning. She wore a black blouse, a wide black belt, and a vivid red skirt. She'd tied a matching red scarf around her neck and had bunched her long red hair into a magnificent ponytail, tied with a black bow. For some reason the skirt had an appliqué of a white poodle on it, and her shoes were a shiny red. She also—and this was new for her—wore a little lipstick and blush.

"You're gorgeous, Wendy!" Mabel said.

"Really beautiful," Dipper said.

"Shut up, you guys," Wendy said, grinning self-consciously.

"You look like a regular real pretty girl!" Soos exclaimed. "You clean up nice, dawg!"

"Don't embarrass her, Soosie," Melody said. "Wendy, all eyes will be on you!"

"But his hair is so oily," Abuelita said.

Soos jumped up. "I gotta get the camera, dawgs. Hey—come pose in here in front of the haunted jukebox!"

They trooped into the Museum. The haunted jukebox was a recent addition, a vintage dome-topped jukebox from the fifties that played 45 rpm vinyl records. It was haunted because no matter which song you picked after dropping in your quarter, it always played "Graveyard Cha-Cha." And that was because Soos had bought fifty copies of that record from a flea market for a nickel apiece, but he had never changed the labels over all the buttons.

The three of them clustered in front of the jukebox, Mabel holding out her pink skirt and pretending to curtsy, while Wendy draped her arm around Dipper's shoulders and he struck a cocky pose, standing as tall as he could, legs casually crossed as he stood on the flat of his right foot and the toe of his left, his chin in the air, his right hand jammed into his jacket pocket, his left one up on Wendy's shoulder. Soos took about ten photos, and they looked at them. "Dude, we're a cute couple," Wendy said.

"Yeah, but combing my hair back like this—"

"Is too oily," Abuelita said.

"Everybody will see my birthmark. I think maybe I'll just leave the oil out," Dipper said.

"Aw, c'mon, Dipper," Mabel prodded. "With Wendy on your arm, who's gonna even look at _you_?"

Melody said, "Well—Dipper is a little sensitive about his birthmark, Mabel."

"Yeah, Hambone," Soos said. "The outfit's great anyway. Let him have the hair."

"OK," Mabel said reluctantly. "But, hey, I'll get him some temporary tattoos for his arms."

"Nobody can see them when I have this jacket on!" Dipper objected. "Nobody'll know they're there!"

"I'll know!" Mabel insisted.

He sighed. "Maybe it'll be all right if I comb my hair back. Let me think about it."

Mabel wanted him and Wendy to practice dancing, so they went up to the attic and she started playing some tunes on her phone, which she plugged into a couple of speakers.

Dipper didn't know how to do any of the weird old-time dances, but Wendy knew a few—her dad had taught her when she was little—and the Twist didn't seem very hard, though really silly. And the Mashed Potato was really just the Twist with some extra footwork. Then Mabel had them do a couple of slow dances. A nervous Dipper concentrated and managed not to step on Wendy's feet, though at times his feet got out of rhythm. "Is dancing with me gonna make you feel weird?" Dipper asked Wendy softly.

She smiled down at him—though he was quite a bit taller than the previous summer, and at least she didn't have to peer as if she were looking for a lost earring on the floor. "Nah, it's cool, Dip. I don't often get a chance to go all full-tilt girly, not that I very often want to, but now and then—it's fun. You gonna be OK?"

"If I don't lose my nerve," Dipper said.

"C'mon, man, you're the guy who stole a car with me! Show your guts."

"I'll try."

She went home not long after that, in the gathering dusk, having first scrubbed off the light make-up. "Dad'd have a fit," she chuckled. "He doesn't want me to wear lipstick until I'm, like, eighteen."

Dipper got out of the costume and into his red T-shirt and gray shorts. Then he finally called Stanford.

The phone went to voicemail right away.

Grunting in frustration, Dipper called Grunkle Stan instead, and he picked up on the first ring: "Yeah, Dip, what's up?"

"I'm actually trying to get in touch with great-uncle Ford," Dipper said, "but he's not answering. Is he around?"

"Hah! You're outa luck, kiddo. Ford got a bee in his bonnet about some strange little burg in Indiana, and he drove to Portland to catch a plane there. He's probably in the air right now. He's gonna spend the weekend runnin' around the streets of this bizarre place with his ghost detector or whatever."

"Aw, man," Dipper said.

"Yeah, I tried to talk him out of it. Waste of money, I say. Why run off to Indiana when he could just hop in a car and drive to that Two Peaks place? It's just one state away, ya know, and they got mysteries there. And I understand the coffee's better, too."

"I found the tree," Dipper said.

"What tree?"

"The woodpecker-eating tree!"

"Oh, that? Was it lost? You do mean the one that's five and a half miles from the Shack, up on Windy Hill? You can spot it from that side of Grim Gulch, but to get to it—"

"You knew it was there?" Dipper yelped. "You knew all the time right where it is?"

"Well, sure. Saw it chomp down on a woodpecker once. Thought about diggin' it up, but I couldn't figure a cost-effective way of movin' it to the Shack. And nobody goes into the Gulch—I did warn ya about the Gulch before, didn't I?"'

"Uh—no."

Oh. Well, don't go down into it, 'cause everybody who does, dies. Anyhow, I found out the tree only eats about one woodpecker a month, so it wouldn't be much of an attraction."

"Grunkle Stan! I've been looking for it for weeks! Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why didn't you ask me, knucklehead?" Stan returned. "I didn't know what the heck you were lookin' for, did I?"

Well . . . no, that was true enough. "OK, sorry," Dipper said. "But I think great-uncle Ford will be excited to hear I finally located it."

"Well, call him back in a couple hours, or better yet early tomorrow morning. He gets up crazy early. 'Course, he does cook breakfast for the McGuckets and me, so I can't complain. Guess the McGuckets and I will have to hit Greasy's for breakfast these next few days."

"I think I'll wait until Ford gets back home," Dipper said. "I'd hate to bother him on his trip, and anyhow I want him to go see the tree with me."

"Whatever. He's gonna be back on Tuesday, he told me. Go ahead and call him tomorrow, anyway, though. Show him that the minute he goes runnin' off halfway across the country somethin' spooky happens right here in Gravity Falls."

"OK. Well I guess I'll see you Friday night."

Stan perked up at that. "Oh, ya comin' to the dance?"

Dipper grinned. "That depends on the price of admission. Do I get a family rate?"

Stan barked with laughter. "Some nerve! I like your style, kid! You bringin' a date?"

"Wendy," Dipper blurted.

For a moment Stan was quiet. Then he said, "You done good, kid. Proud of you. I should let you both in for free."

"Thanks, Grunkle Stan."

"Yeah, but I'd be losin' money that way, so here's the deal: a twofer. You pay regular admission, Wendy gets in for nothin'."

"Deal," Dipper said.

"But don't tell anybody else!"

"I won't. Uh—wait, not even Mabel?"

"Especially not Mabel!" Stan said. "I'm lettin' _her_ in for free!" And he hung up.

* * *

The next morning, Thursday, Dipper got up early, Wendy came early, and they did the exercise routine. This time his energy held out, and he kept up with her all the way into town. "Good goin'," she complimented him. "Now let's go round the block and head back. We're makin' good time, and we're addin' distance."

"OK," Dipper said. They kept to the sidewalk and made the turn at the next street. Dipper couldn't help glancing over at the Arcade.

The Magick Shop was back.

He almost stumbled. "Wendy," he said, "Look over there, between the coffee shop and—"

"I see it, dude," Wendy told him. "That some kinda ghost palace or something? Don't stop running! Tell me as we head back!"

Dipper explained to her about noticing the intruding shop earlier—and about Ford's not being able to see it, though his instruments had indicated something a little off.

"Don't go into that place," Wendy said. "I'm serious, Dipper."

"Do—do you know anything about it?"

"Just that it gives off a real bad vibe. Call Ford and have him check it out again."

"He's out of state." Dipper briefly summed up what Stan had told him the night before.

"Well, wait, then, but call him in on it when he's back," Wendy said. "What's that jinglin' sound, man?"

"I guess I left some coins in the pocket of these shorts," Dipper said. "Forgot about 'em."

"C'mon, let's pick it up a little. Dipper, promise me now—you won't go in that place, right?"

"I promise," Dipper said, beginning to feel winded. "I won't go in there."

And he really meant it.


	5. Chapter 5

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 5: At the Hop**

Against his better judgment, Dipper combed his hair back and used his Grunkle Stan's hair tonic. That mean his Big-Dipper birthmark showed—but as it happened, that didn't matter much. Stan had rigged up lights with colored gels—blue, yellow, and red—that overlapped and made the dance floor in the Gravity Falls Teen Center a kaleidoscope of color, and nobody could see well, anyway.

He and Wendy had walked in, he paid seven-fifty at the ticket window (making sure no one behind him would overhear the special family rate), and he and Wendy and Mabel strolled in as Robbie and his band (they called themselves Robbie and the Retros at the moment, and they were all wearing seventies bling costumes, with big Afro wigs) struck up a nostalgic number.

"Hey, look," Mabel said, "Tambry's playing the tambourine! Aw, that's so sweet!"

"Yeah," Wendy said with a laugh. "Her and Robbie! They've become, like, a really sickening couple!"

They had arrived a little early, and about thirty couples were dancing in a space that could accommodate maybe eight times that number. "Well," Dipper said, taking a deep breath, "wanna dance?"

"Yeah, I guess so!" Wendy said.

"I've spotted a fifteen-year-old boy, stag," Mabel said. "I'm going in to work on him!"

Robbie had a passable voice, and he was crooning the lyrics of an old song:

* * *

"Oh, my baby, don't get hookworm, please—

You can catch it if you're bit by fleas—

It makes you shaky and weak in the knees,

So my baby, don't get hookworm, please."

* * *

It was a fairly slow tempo, so Dipper and Wendy did a slow dance as their first one. He kept hearing other girls whispering, "Who's that?" and "Wendy? No way! She's in a _skirt_!"

And he noticed that Wendy was catching the eye of almost every boy. They danced past the bandstand, and Robbie did a double-take and stumbled over the lyrics, but then he shrugged, plunged back into the song, and even gave Dipper a thumbs-up.

 _I think the whole world has gone a little crazy._

The crowd grew rapidly as Wendy and Dipper danced three of the first five dances together. They sat out the third in the set because Wendy wanted a soft drink, and then the fifth, because that was one of Robbie's originals, and you couldn't really dance to it unless you were a robot with a few screws loose. Then Robbie and the Retros retired from the stage, promising to be back with hits from the Seventies next.

In the brief lull, boys and girls kept coming by and complimenting Dipper and Wendy on their costumes. Lee gave them two thumbs up and said, "You guys and Mabel rule! If you don't win first prize, it's gotta be rigged!"

Wendy shrugged. "Knowin' Stan, it prob'ly is. Who's your date?"

"Lucille," Lee said. "She's in the ladies'."

"Yeah, I know her. Quiet type, glasses, likes math?"

"That's her," Lee said. He grinned bashfully. "Nate says she's too quiet for me, but I dunno, she's kinda neat. Nate was gonna come, but him and his family are off on a visit to his grandparents, so—"

"Well, you and Lucille will be a cute couple," Wendy said. "I see you're wearing the standard plaid shirt and jeans of the fifties. What about her?"

"She's, like, a hippie chick from the seventies. I'll bring her over later."

"Cool."

Then Soos took over at the DJ station and decided to start off with karaoke—"Dudes, any chicks out there wanna sing one of the biggest hits by any female vocalist of the eighties?"

"Me!" Dipper didn't even have to look, but he did anyway and saw Mabel running—literally running—across the heads of the crowd and up to the stage. She made a leap and stuck out her hand, yelling, "Mike me!"

Soos tossed her a wireless microphone and said, "Dawgs, this was made famous by Patti Bendabar! It's called 'Sweet Treats!' Sing it, Mabel Pines!"

Mabel didn't even have to look at the monitor. She began bopping to the heavy rhythm of the lead-in, raised the microphone as the intro began, and tore into a belt-it-out rendition of the lyrics:

* * *

"Sweet treats were made for me,

Like 'em best when they're all free,

Second helping? I will agree!

Cookies, candy, choc'late ice cream—

Some of them upset my tummy,

All of them always are yummy,

All of them want to be eaten,

The best of them cannot be beaten!

Ooo-ooo! Fill my plate up!"

* * *

The crowd was hooting encouragement, chanting the chorus, and dancing along with her. Wendy leaned down and over the amped-up music—and Mabel's voice—yelled, "Mabes gets an A-plus for enthusiasm, anyway!"

After the song ended and Mabel had taken nine bows, Robbie appeared again, having changed into his normal outfit of broken-heart hoodie and tight jeans. "Enjoying yourselves?" he asked, sounding sarcastic.

"Yeah," Dipper said, bracing himself. "Me and my girl."

Robbie laughed—a little snarky laugh—but he grinned, too. "That's cool, I guess. Hey, Wendy, Tambry's OK with us dancing once for old time's sake. Is it OK with your date?"

"Dip?" asked Wendy.

"Be my guest," he said, stepping back.

Soos had reached back into the remote fifties for the next number, a horn-heavy tune called "The Chocolate Mint Twist." It didn't look very hard to do, and Dipper made his way over to Tambry. "Want to dance?" he asked her, mainly to annoy Robbie.

"Whatever," she said with the empty-eyed stare of the terminally bored. But then she really got into the music, gyrating her hips and bouncing from foot to foot. Dipper stayed mostly in one place and just tried to keep up with her and look as if he were enjoying himself.

When the song ended, Tambry chuckled. "Thanks for the dance, you little maniac."

"Hey, my pleasure," Dipper told her. "Here come Robbie and Wendy."

"Hey, Tambry," Wendy said. "Dip's not bad, is he?"

"Not that terrible," she agreed, which coming from Tambry was the equivalent of a hot kiss on the lips. "Want to dance with me now, Robbie?"

"For the rest of the night, babe," Robbie said, linking arms with her, and the two of them kissed and then went into a moving clench when Soos started another slow dance number.

"Do you regret dumping him?" Dipper quietly asked Wendy as they watched the two dance.

Wendy chuckled. "Nah, not really. I was mad, but I got over it fast. Robbie and I were never on the same wavelength, anyhow, and look how happy he and Tambry are together."

"Wendy, go on and dance with anyone you want to," Dipper said. "Really, I don't mind. I'll go over by the concession stand and I'll be there whenever you want to find me."

"Maybe just two or three dances," Wendy said. She hugged him. "Thanks, Dipper. You're the first guy who's taken me to a dance and not been, like, all clingy."

Dipper's heart ached a little, but he said, "It's OK. Go find somebody your own age. I think every guy in the place is wanting to dance with you. See you later."

"See you sooner," she said firmly. "You _are_ my date, man."

Dipper felt as if he were swelling visibly. He strutted over to the concession stand, where Grunkle Stan, wearing white bell-bottom trousers and a white jacket over a wide-collared open-necked red shirt (and about eleven gold chains under that), was counting money. "Hiya, knucklehead," he said cheerfully. "Saw you bustin' some moves with Wendy and that weird phone girl. You playin' the field, you dog?"

Dipper blinked. "What with the what now? Oh, does that mean going with a lot of girls? No, I learned my lesson on our road trip, but Wendy and Robbie danced together, so I danced with Robbie's girl. That's all. Having a good night, Grunkle Stan?"

Stan shrugged, but couldn't keep his toothy grin from spreading beneath his orange nose. "Meh, it's OK. Wish I could weasel out of payin' those tin-eared musicians, but I suppose a contract is a contract, and these nuts seem to like 'em for some reason. I'm clearin' at least a grand on the shindig, anyway, not even countin' the refreshments with their jacked-up prices, so I got no kick comin'."

Unless she was on stage singing karaoke—and she frequently was—Mabel never once left the dance floor. And no matter what peculiar dance tune Soos put on and called for—the Watusi, the Frug, the Swim, the Loco-Motion, the Pony, even the Funky Chicken—Mabel appeared to know the steps or at least to be able to fake them so you couldn't tell the difference. And Dipper lost count of the dance partners she had, from a kid who looked too young to be awake at eight p.m. to the fifteen-year old she had mentioned, others maybe a year younger, and even—once—Robbie, who couldn't even keep up with her when they were doing something called the Bop, which looked a lot as though they were frantically trying to stamp out a grass fire.

Later, Robbie and his band, the Tombstones when they weren't posing as the Retros, returned. In the group were four guys, with Robbie on vocals and rhythm guitar, a guy named Mark on lead guitar, another named Phil on bass, and a hefty guy named Benny B on drums, plus Tambry, who played tambourine and joined in on the vocals. After Soos's first DJ set, the band came out twice more, in different outfits—hippie-style, pink and green and yellow shades and fringed threads for one set, and ripped jeans and grunge jackets for another.

Dipper and Wendy danced several more times—Dipper had exhausted his whole file of dance steps by then—and he looked around for another girl to dance with whenever Wendy danced with some friend of hers from school, but all the girls his age—and there were so few of them!—seemed to have paired up with older guys, so he stood against the wall and talked to Grunkle Stan for a little while.

At nine-thirty, Soos made an announcement: "Dudes and dudettes, the judges have been, like, circulating secretly, you know? And they've picked out these finalists for the contest." He read the names of ten people—including Wendy, Dipper, and Mabel. Then he said, "Now, we're gonna have like a dance-off to pick the three winners and the runner-up. So everybody give them some room, dudes, and let's have the contestants come up?"

They did, and Mabel yelled, "Soos! Can my brother an' Wendy an' me be a team?"

"Uh—hold on." Five people—two middle-aged guys and three women, all dressed like teens from the eighties or nineties—clustered and murmured, and the oldest woman nodded at Soos. "Judges say yes! So everybody remember these three are, like, one contestant, like that three-headed dog dude in the Harry Potter movie. Get your applause hands ready, 'cause the winners are the ones who get the loudest audience reaction!"

 _I'm gonna blow it for us all,_ Dipper thought despondently. He shot a desperate, pleading glance at Wendy.

In response, Wendy punched his arm lightly. "Dude, don't go negative on me! C'mon, we got this. Mabel and I will carry the weight—you just stay in place and let us dance around you. Keep time and have fun, that's all you gotta do!"

"Remember the 90s, dudes?" Soos called. "'Cause if you do, dawgs, you're sure to remember the Macarena!"

The salsa-flavored music began, and Mabel pumped the air with both fists. "Yay! I love this tune!"

"'Kay, Dipper," Wendy said rapidly, "step side to side and follow our hand jive while we go around you!"

Dipper managed to keep more or less in time with the music, though from the get-go, he thought he was already a half-beat off on the hand movements. But the crowd didn't seem to notice—most of them were staring at Wendy's flaring and swirling red poodle skirt, anyway, or rather at her in it. They all started to clap as the fast-paced dance got under way.

Mabel was positively leaping from foot to foot, her hair flying. Wendy kept clapping her hands and yelling, "Go! Go!" and the crowd picked up on that too. Almost before Dipper knew it, the song wound down, to a room full of applause and cheers.

Then Soos did his applause-meter thing. A middle-aged couple were runners-up, and they appeared happy with that. Then Thompson and a girl named Kylie came in third, Robbie and Tambry second—and Mabel, Wendy, and Dipper took first place.

The grand prize was a little plastic trophy about three inches tall—and three free passes to the Mystery Shack. Dipper laughed. "Grunkle Stan! Count on him to be cheap!"

"You can have the trophy, Wendy," Mabel said. "I'm satisfied with the moral victory! Hey, is it OK if I find somebody who wants the passes?"

Of course it was, and it took her about half a minute to distribute them. Then Wendy and Dipper relaxed with a soda—while Mabel tried to decide among five young teen boys who came clustering up around her asking for the next dance. It was turning into a really good night. When Robbie V. and the Tombstones came out for their last set, it was in their normal death metal gear, and they did five of their own songs. By that time the crowd was in such a good mood that it even cheered them on.

At last, Soos said, "Well, dawgs, the little hand of the clock—wait, clocks have hands now?—uh, the little hand of the clock is on ten and the minute hand is, like, catchin' up with it, so this has to be the last dance. And it's a moldy oldie but a pretty goodie—and it's appropriate, dudes, 'cause the title is 'One Last Dance.'"

It was a slow piano-heavy tune, and Wendy said, "We gotta dance this one together."

So they did, and out on the floor, she said softly, "Dude, you can hold me closer if you want."

"Oh, yeah, I want," Dipper said. It was about three minutes and twelve seconds of heaven, and then it was over. Robbie and his group played some moody exit music—and people kept filing by the bandstand and dropping dollar bills in their tip jar and in Soos's—and Dipper rummaged in his pockets.

He'd brought a few bucks to buy Stan's overpriced refreshments, but for a few moments he couldn't find any bills. From his jacket pocket—huh, he didn't remember dropping them in there—he pulled out a handful of quarters.

But then he realized he had folded up some singles and tucked them in the little tight watch pocket of the jeans, so he took them out. Four, so he divided them equally between Soos and Robbie. To Soos, he said, "Good job, man," and got a buck-toothed grin and a thumbs up from the big handyman, who really got a kick out of any DJ gig. When he put the other two dollars into Robbie's tip jar, he just nodded and said, "Enjoyed it."

He and Wendy walked out into the cool evening. "I really liked this," Dipper said.

"Yeah, I had a lot of fun," Wendy agreed. "You're comin' along as a dancer." They headed for her car, and then she said, "Hey, Dip? Can I ask you something?"

"Anything," Dipper said.

She was quiet for a few moments. They reached her old Dodge Dart and climbed in, and then Wendy said quietly, "Dude, you're changin' in a lot of ways. I mean, you're workin' out, you're dancin' and all. Am I—am I like crowding you? I mean, it's real sweet that you're trying all these things, but, Dip, I don't want to feel like you're doin' it all if you don't really want to, just to please me. I'd be all like covered in a layer of deep gooey guilt, man."

Dipper laughed. "No! Wendy, you're the best thing in my life. I always wanted to be stronger and to be—well, I won't say cool, 'cause I guess I'm too strange for that, but at least less of a weirdo nerd, you know? Be able to dance and to talk to people without clenching up. Everything you're helping me do is something I've always wanted."

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. "Good to know." She popped her door open and yelled, "Hey, Mabel! Want a ride to the Shack? Stan's probably gonna be busy kissin' all his money."

"Thanks!" Mabel came bounding over. "Shotgun!"

Dipper moved over to sit in the center, close to Wendy—not that he minded. Wendy said, "Buckle up, now. We're drivin' into danger, dudes! Streets are full of teens hopped up on Pitt Soda an' rock and roll!"

But it was a calm drive, and Wendy dropped them off at the Shack. With surprising tact, Mabel went straight in—and so let Dipper share a quick good-night kiss with Wendy—and Wendy reminded him, "Be ready at eight tomorrow! Full set of exercises and a two-mile run. Get to sleep early."

"I'll try," he said.

Mabel was waiting for him in the attic. "So how did it go, brobro? Are you and Wendy floating on clouds of romance in an idyllic sea?"

"When they talk about metaphors in freshman English this year, pay attention, OK? Well—I think we're both happy. How about you, Sis?"

"Oo, I got a list of six hot prospects! See, I'm takin' after you now! Making lists! Setting priorities! Practicing kissing! M-wah!"

"I do not practice kissing!"

"Yeah, you do! Your pillow has lip prints all over it! Anyway, I danced with a lot of guys, and the six I'm gonna zero in on are fourteen—three of them—and fifteen—two more. And there's one surprisingly mature twelve-year-old. If you and Wendy can make it work, I suppose I can experiment with romancing a younger man!"

"I noticed Pacifica wasn't there," Dipper said.

Mabel shrugged. "Didn't see any of her old crowd, either. I think a retro dance might be a little too—what's a fancy word for 'crummy'?"

"Déclassé," Dipper suggested.

Mabel laughed, making her lips flap in a raspberry sound, and she punched his shoulder, harder than Wendy ever did. "There isn't any such word! You made it up."

"OK, OK," Dipper said.

"Seriously, though," Mabel said, "I think there was only that one guy—Barry—who was even as young as we are. And there were so many, like, old people, thirty and forty and up. Nostalgia dance for them, I guess." She yawned. "Well, I'm gonna go turn in. Soos stayed to help clean up—"

"I forgot that!" Dipper yelped. "Man, Stan's gonna be so mad at us!"

"No, it's cool. I had a talk with Grunkle Stan. He said that since we won the contest, we were off the hook, and he offered Robbie and his bunch a fifty-dollar bonus if they'd stay and help for half an hour."

"Wow," Dipper said. "He must be in a really good mood!"

Mabel went down to her room, and Dipper began to undress. When he took off the jacket, it jingled, and he remembered all those quarters. He reached in and dumped them in a pile on his bedside table, then hung the jacket over a chair and tugged off his jeans. It was a bit like skinning a fish—they were very tight. He thought about showering, decided to put it off until after his exercise and run the next morning, and in his undershorts and t-shirt he hit the sack.

He reached to turn out the bedside light and one of the quarters caught his eye. It looked wrong, somehow, a little too large. He picked it up and saw that it wasn't a coin at all—not an official one, anyway. One side of it was blank except for the number 1 and the word "ANSWER" etched beneath it. The other showed a profile of—

" _Pacifica_?"

Who could have slipped that into his pocket? He sorted through the others and found a Ford coin, a Lazy Susan one, a Toby Determined one, a Shandra Jiminez one, a Soos one, a Melody one, a Grunkle Stan—

They all bore images of people from Gravity Falls. Dipper counted thirty of them. What in the world? Though he was sleepy and tired, he hauled out his Journal and wrote a page about them:

* * *

 _Tonight after a great dance—I'll write about that later—I found thirty coins in my jacket pocket. I didn't put them there. Somebody at the dance must've snuck them in when I wasn't looking. They're all engraved on one side with pictures—somebody from town on every one of them. There's not one of me, though—I'll do a complete list tomorrow after breakfast._

 _On the back of each coin it says "1 ANSWER."_

 _This makes me wonder if it has anything to do with that magick shop. I believe I dreamed that someone from that shop—I think, the dream's all hazy now—that someone, anyway, told me there were answers for sale._

 _And I have always wanted answers._

 _But—I hope I've learned in the last year that the worst things have a way of making themselves attractive. I am going to lock these silver coins away until great-uncle Ford gets back next week. I'm not about to spend them on answers or anything else._

 _And especially—not in that mysterious shop._


	6. Chapter 6

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 6: The Price for Answers**

The next morning Dipper woke slowly, feeling a little disoriented. He glanced at his clock: past seven-thirty already, and Wendy was coming at eight. Yet the room looked strangely dark, and for a moment he hoped that Saturday had dawned stormy so he could get out of the exercises and the run.

He rolled out of bed and checked the window. No storm, just a very heavy fog. Well, maybe Wendy wouldn't be able to drive in that mess—but knowing her, she'd probably turn up. Dipper briefly pondered changing his undershirt and undershorts, but he'd just get them sweaty, anyway, so he dug out one of his two pairs of running shorts, some athletic socks, and his trainers. He kept yawning, and when he went to the bathroom and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, for a second he wondered why his hair looked so weird.

Oh, right, the hair tonic. He tried to brush it forward the way he usually did, and it wound up sticking out in stiff locks, so he sort of arranged it, tugged a sweat band over it, and decided that was as good as it would get. He went downstairs as quietly as he could, out the parlor door, and into the side yard.

Man, no wonder it was so dark! The fog was so dense he couldn't even see the trees. A heavy dew lay on everything—the grass, the Shack, and even rapidly collecting on his shirt and shorts. _Wendy wouldn't try to drive through this!_

He took out his phone and tried to call her, but nothing happened. He had no bars. Well, the Gravity Falls relay towers were notorious for losing their signal. Sometimes it was something ordinary—power failure—and sometimes it was something a little bit weirder—like maybe a pterodactyl tearing off part of the tower to build its nest.

In case Wendy _was_ trying to make it over, Dipper went back into the Shack and switched on the parking-lot lights. All three of them. When he returned to the yard, he could barely see the nearer two, one a light halo, the other a mere pale smudge. The one farthest from the Shack and closest to the driveway didn't penetrate the fog at all from its distance.

His phone showed the time as 7:54. Still it could get no signal. Just in case Wendy showed up—she surely wouldn't insist on their running downtown, because that would be dangerous with so little visibility—Dipper walked a little way from the Shack and did some leg stretches.

At 8:01 the fog had closed in even more. Visibility was down to a matter of a few feet—Dipper couldn't even see the loom of the Shack behind him, and the day had become as murky as the last lingering twilight on an overcast day. He couldn't even be sure that he was looking in the right direction, for that matter. He decided to wait on the porch—if he could even find it!

Groping through the gloom, he stumbled over something but caught his balance in time to avoid falling.

But—in his shorts pocket, as he lurched, something . . . jingled.

He had put those coins away—he knew he had—in his metal lockbox. He kept personal things in it—well, to be honest, mostly some photos of Wendy and a lot of love letters that he'd written to her since the previous September but had never had the courage to mail. He'd dropped the silver coins in the box and had locked the lid—and yet they had showed up again in his pocket, though he knew what they were only from the feel of them, disks a little larger than a quarter with no milled edge.

For some reason, right at that moment he really, really didn't want to pull them out of his pocket and look at them. He finally saw the shadowy bulk of the Shack and found the steps up to the front porch. He took them slowly—wait, weren't there only three steps up? No, four, five—

 _Something is really wrong!_

He turned to run back down, then saw a dim, tall, thin figure coming out of the fog, so veiled and blurred that he couldn't make out anything more than a gray shape, barely more solid-looking than the lighter gray of the fog. He asked, "Wendy? Is that you?"

 _No._

The figure stretched out a hand—and something burned in Dipper's pocket, really grew hot. He heard a clink and saw a white streak leap from his pocket and into the figure's outstretched hand.

 _The payment is . . . Gideon Gleeful._

"I didn't buy anything!"

 _Yes, you did. One answer. Next question?_

"No! No, no, no, no! I won't ask any more questions!"

 _You will, though, in time. We know._

The fog lightened all at once, as though simply evaporating. He was where he had intended to be, on the porch, and the tall, dark figure had vanished with the mists. Yet—

 _Something was wrong with the Shack!_

Though it had regained its familiar outlines, and the light was better and the fog gone, it looked—strange. No color in it—all shades of ominous gray. Dipper went back in and rushed to Mabel's room. He knocked—and his knuckles made no sound. He pushed the door open. Mabel lay in bed, still asleep, but like everything else, she had no color—grays shading from charcoal to a light tone. Dipper reached out to shake her arm, but—he couldn't.

Oh, his hand closed on it, but when he tried to shake her awake he might as well have tried to move a tree. She felt solid—and she wasn't breathing.

Feeling panic rising in him, Dipper headed out—and then noticed that the kitschy clock, the one that looked like a leering cat, had stopped at 8:04, its pendulum tail standing at an angle. His phone would not power up to show the time. Dipper looked outside and saw Wendy, already in her exercise togs, standing frozen partway to the Shack, her car already parked in the lot—and the parking-lot lights were on.

He hurried outside, but she stood still as a statue. "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh!" he yelped. "Wendy! Wendy, can you hear me?"

 _She cannot. Payment is due._

Again Dipper felt a sudden searing pain as one of the coins heated up and zipped out of his pocket, streaking for the horizon.

 _The payment is . . . Edwin Durland._

Dipper clamped his teeth together, cutting off his impulse to demand, "Where are you!"

 _This is bad, this is bad, this is bad!_

He tried to force himself to stop and think rationally. What did that voice, if it was a voice and not just something in his head, mean? In what sense had he paid for two useless questions with two people from Gravity Falls?

It was clear to him that he couldn't call his great-uncle Stanford. Nor, apparently, could he ask anyone else—any question might bring on unforeseen consequences. He went back up to the attic and discovered that he couldn't even consult the Journals. Oh, he could touch them, but they were just as immovable as Mabel was—he couldn't pick them up or even open his own journal, which lay on the bedside table. He couldn't pick up a pen—it felt glued down. Doors seemed to work, but nothing else.

 _OK, think, think—go check on Gideon! That's all I can do._

It was a long walk, more than a mile, through town to the Gleeful house. He made it through eerie silence, under a pewter-colored sky. Vehicles on the road stood frozen—people driving to work, Manly Dan in his logging truck, all stood still on the streets as though parked, though some trailed immobile dust clouds. He'd only seen things like this when Blendin Blenjamin Blandin was around—the time traveler who could freeze time and suspend birds in mid-flight.

But this—this _felt_ different, as if he were almost but not quite outside the world. More like the time Bill Cipher had tricked him and had taken his body, leaving Dipper for all intents and purposes a disembodied ghost.

But he had a body—and it grew hot and tired as he walked through the uncanny silence. He finally came to the Gleeful house, a neat and tidy place. He tried again to knock, with no success, but found the front door unlocked. He went inside. Mr. and Mrs. Gleeful sat at the breakfast table, she with a cup halfway to her lips, he with a sausage link speared on his fork. A wisp of steam from it hung frozen in the air.

Gideon, Gideon, where would he be? Dipper had never been in the house before, but he started to search. He found Gideon's room and opened the door—and there stood Gideon, caught in the act of tying his shoe.

But he looked wrong, somehow, a darker gray than all the other people. Dipper reached out to touch his arm.

His fingers sank right into the flesh, which crumbled away, leaving a greasy feel. Dipper jerked back in alarm. The figure's arm flaked away, the lower part and hand falling and shattering on the floor with a sickly, oily sound. The dissolving flesh stopped at the shoulder, but now bits were falling out of Gideon's face. Dipper became aware that for the first time since he'd entered the strange foggy world he could smell something, almost taste it, something bitter and acrid, like ashes.

He stared at the scattered chunks and flakes of ash on the floor and saw that, spreading from them like rot, the oily grayness was sending out black, jagged tendrils, was taking over the carpet. The fabric itself began turning to ash, slowly, right in front of Dipper's eyes.

He felt like vomiting.

He backed away from the decaying figure. _Did I—kill Gideon? Wait, that's another question!_

But to his relief he felt no heat in his pocket, heard no whispery voice in his head. _OK, so I have to ASK a question out loud before anything happens. Must remember that. No speaking a question!_

 _Soos's face, and Melody's, are on two of the coins. And Grunkle Stan and great-uncle Ford—and Wendy! And—and Mabel!_

Choking back a sob of fear and despair, Dipper all but ran from the Gleeful house. Back through town, then down the street where the Arcade was, and yes, there, the only sign of any color in the world, stood the Magick Shop, the letters of its sign now a stark red against all the grayness. The door stood open, inviting him to climb the steps and . . . come in.

No. He wouldn't go in there, no matter what. He wouldn't go in—

He crossed the street and ran down the block and around the corner—

There stood the sheriff's cruiser. Blubs was at the wheel, his mouth open, a cardboard cup of coffee raised, as if he'd been stopped just before taking a sip.

Beside him was a crumbling gray effigy of Deputy Durland. He'd been trailing his arm out the open passenger window of the patrol car—and the door, where his arm touched it, was beginning to turn gray and to disintegrate.

 _I have to get back to—to the other side of this! I've got to stop this!_

But he was alone—no one could hear him, let alone help him. He thought furiously as he headed back to the Shack. _This is a little bit like when we got pulled through into the Between by the ghost. A little bit like when we were in Grunkle Stan's mind, trying to keep Bill from getting the combination to his safe. A little bit like Weirdmageddon._

 _Wait, what if I'm in the Mindscape now?_

 _One way to find out._

Dipper tried to concentrate on doing something impossible. Flying. He could do it in the Mindscape, and he suspected that when she was in her prison bubble Mabel could have pulled it off if she'd wanted to—

But no, he remained earthbound.

 _Got to find answers—without asking questions!_

Dipper broke into a run—he was dressed for it, anyway, and he wanted to get back as fast as he could. He saw no other crumbling figures, no other signs of spreading decay, and when he got back to the Shack, Wendy still stood exactly in the same place, caught in mid-stride, a little smile on her face. "Don't change," Dipper pleaded with her, though he knew she couldn't hear. "Just—don't change. I'll find some way to help you!"

He paced the yard, thinking furiously. _Whoever, whatever is doing this—must be someone like Bill, some force from outside our reality. Because this isn't normal! Wait—maybe something, someone abnormal can help me. Like—maybe I can still talk to ghosts!_

And he knew where one ghost might be found—the hideously wounded lumberjack that he and Pacifica had first captured in a silver mirror when the Northwest Mansion had been haunted, and whom Pacifica had finally sent to his rest when she defied her father and opened the house to the ordinary people of town.

Except he had not really been laid to rest—he had returned to his old home, deciding not to go on to—to Lumberjack Heaven or wherever, but to stay in the forest he had always loved. Dipper had glimpsed him from time to time, now a benign (though rather terrifying in appearance, what with the axe imbedded deeply in his split-open head) forest spirit rather than a Category 11 vengeance ghost.

 _Gotta find him! I've seen him over near the river, then over in Creepy Hollow, and one time close to the Falls, but most often in the woods south of the Shack._ True, almost every time the sightings had been nothing more than fleeting glimpses, but maybe if he concentrated he could call the ghost. He even had a suspicion, never confirmed, that he knew the ghost's name.

Archibald Corduroy.

If he was right, the ghost might actually be Wendy's great-grandfather. Or even great-great grandfather. Dipper only knew that in the Corduroy house he'd seen a very old tintype photo of someone who looked like a younger, and, well, _alive_ version of the ghost. Manly Dan had told him the name, but he'd only grunted, "One o' our ancestors" without further identifying him.

With no other hope and no other ideas, Dipper went straight into the woods. For a change he didn't have to worry about supernatural terrors—the Gremloblin and others of his kind were flesh and blood, not spirits, and he felt sure they would be just as petrified as the people of the town.

He walked for hours—but the sun—if there was a sun above that diffused white-gray glow in the sky—didn't move and time didn't seem to pass. And yet—

"I'm hungry."

 _What am I going to do? I can't eat anything—can't even pick a berry off a bush—and can't drink any water, because it's all hard as ice, though not cold. I'll starve or die of thirst before I can solve this if I'm not quick._

Dipper called for the ghost both as "Lumberjack Ghost!" and also as "Archibald! Mr. Corduroy!" without getting an answer. He was beginning to feel winded and sat down on a stone to rest. Then, with a little shock, he realized that ahead of him was the stone figure of Bill Cipher, hand outstretched as it had been when the real Bill had shaken Grunkle Stan's hand—thinking it was Stanford's—and had leaped out of his corporeal form and into Stan's mind.

With a sigh, Dipper said, "Bill Cipher. I almost wish you were here!"

And immediately, like the buzz of a bee fifteen feet away, he heard a tiny, flat sound, high pitched and annoying: "Well, well, well, well, well-well-well!"

Dipper jumped up, clenching his fists. "Bill! Show yourself!"

"I _am_ showing myself, Pine Tree! There's just not much to show right now."

"I can't see you."

"Not my fault. I can't get bigger. You shrink down!"

"I can't do that, Bill! I don't have any powers!"

"Well, neither do I at the moment! It's all I can do to hang together in one piece. C'mon, kid, you're in the Mindscape—no, wait a minute. You're not. Hmm. This is an interdimension, not the Mindscape. That's peculiar."

"I don't understand what you mean!"

"This is a really weird one, too. What's going on, Dipper Pines? They can't destroy this dimension! Not until I get strong enough to leave it!"

"I don't know what's happening!"

"Hmm. Okay, kid, I got this. The Mindscape should still be achievable. You go to sleep." After five seconds, the little voice added irritably, "Didn't you hear me, Pine Tree? Sleep! Now!"

"We don't work like that!" Dipper objected. "I can't just sleep on command. I'm too keyed-up, too upset."

"OK, kid, calm down. Find a soft patch of turf and lie down on it."

"Nothing's soft! Everything is hard and even the grass feels sharp."

"Worse than I thought. All righty, Pine Tree, there's a nice level sandy spot right over there. Lie down there. See it?"

"Got it. Bill, straight up—is this—I mean, tell me if this is one of your tricks!"

"No, kid, it really isn't. When you see me, you'll know. Look, I want to find out what's going on just as bad as you obviously do, so cooperate, huh? I swear on my hope of getting my hat back that I won't hurt you or trick you in any way. Go lie down!"

 _Don't trust him. Don't summon him at any cost._

 _But—sorry, great-uncle Ford—I have to!_

Dipper lay down—the ground was hard as stone—and said, "I'm still not sleepy!"

"I'm hovering right inside your ear," Bill's voice said from the right. "Listen to me and I'll talk you down. Now start to relax. Begin with your—what do you call 'em—oh, right, your toes. Make 'em nice and loose. Completely relaxed. Now your ankles. Loose and relaxed . . . ."

Following the disembodied voice's instructions, Dipper let himself untense his muscles a little at a time, and at some point—he wasn't sure exactly when—he fell asleep.

"Congratulations, kid We're both in the Mindscape. You remember how you can do anything here? Shrink down!"

Dipper concentrated, and—everything around him ballooned to gigantic shape.

"Aw, you can do better! Smaller! Lots smaller, kid!"

Again. Then again.

Dipper said, "I must be microscopic!"

"You are. Trouble is, I'm _sub_ microscopic! Shrink again!"

And finally Dipper glimpsed a small hovering yellow speck—Dipper himself was the size of a pin point, so it had to be really tiny. It took three more sessions of shrinking, but at long last, Dipper saw Bill Cipher, or what was left of him—not a pyramid, but a flat yellow triangle made up of little spheres—ten of them, in fact: four on a bottom row, three above that (the middle one was solid black, and Dipper guessed it was an eyespot), then two, then one.

"Congrats, Pine Tree, you did it," Bill said. The figure lacked the bowtie, the top hat, the cane, even the rudimentary stick-figure arms and legs. "Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking. Probably. I'll admit I've been better. I got ten molecules to my name, which by the way I just remembered when I got the last one in place. It's Cipher! To begin bargain bemoan—sorry, I'm still having language problems—I mean, in order to get out of this continuum condominimum, sorry, this dimension, I have to pull myself together to the tune of at least a hundred, maybe even several thousand, before I can make a trans-dimensional jump. Am I even making sense? It takes most of my concentration to hold together. I'm not myself. It's hard for me even to think coherently sometimes."

"You're making more sense than anything else today," Dipper said.

"As if that's a comfort. Hang on, Pine Tree, let me try to pull myself together. Chaotic calm place, chaotic calm place, chaotic calm place . . . . Okay, I've done my medication meditation mediation—sorry, I get off the track track track sometimes. Just relax my boy, and tell the Herr Doctor Dictator Duckbeak—sorry, I'm steady now, tell me all about it. Start with what's happening in good old Gravity Falls. Get it off your chest. Think of this as a session with a shrink!"

"I don't really _know_ what's happening! But listen, it'll get worse if I say a question out loud, so stop me if it looks like I'm going to do that."

The yellow triangle vibrated. "Questions? Oh, my random arrangement of forces and matter! Pine Tree, tell me while I'm making sense, is there an entity loose in your dimension? Something that gives you answers at a price, I mean?"

"I don't know. I think there's something like that. A handful of coins appeared from nowhere—"

"Silver?"

"Uh, yeah, or they look like it."

The yellow triangle spun rapidly, making a whizzing noise, but finally came to a wobbly stop as the mosquito-whine voice moaned, "Oh, no, no, no! This is bad, Dipper Pines. This is very, very bad! But don't be afraid. Don't be scared—oh, bad, bad, bad! You and I will have to work together if—can you take it, Pine Tree?—if you don't want your universe to come to a horrible end!"

"Tell me what the entity is," Dipper said, carefully avoiding a question.

"I'm not sure, but I think—well, I'm almost sure—I hope it's not, but maybe it is—"

"Just tell me!"

In his small, fearful voice, Bill almost whispered, "The Horroracle!"


	7. Chapter 7

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 7: Breaking Wave**

The story came from Bill in broken showers of tortured words, interrupted by long pauses while the tiny triangle re-gathered his strength. Dipper learned to signal him when he began to gibber into confusion and unintelligibility, and they'd take a pause—though Dipper burned with the desire to learn everything as soon as possible.

"The Horroracle is a truth-saying soothsayer," Bill began, his tinny little voice sounding comical, but the information decidedly serious. "It, he, whatever, de-creates universes by closing doors of possibility, collapsing the wave into stasis. Always know that what he predicts will come true. However, never believe anything he says, because every word is a lie. A particle, but a wave at the same time, see? Your universe is a standing wave, and he's trying to break it. He's evil, he's an agent of order."

"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "Agents of order are supposed to be good."

A hint of rage came through Bill's monotonous tone: "Good for nothing!"

Dipper shook his head. "You're the worst liar I've ever known, and you call this Horroracle a liar! Just because you like chaos doesn't mean—"

"Pine Tree, you're not listening to me! Open your eye and hear what you're seeing! I'm not saying the Horroracle is a good-for-nothing, I'm saying he's good for Nothing, that's a noth with a capital N. As in oblivion. The end of universes. Nothing more orderly than nothing! When it's all happened and over and done with, that's ultimate order."

Despite the confusing words, Dipper felt a chilling certainty that here, at last, was some truth from Bill—if he could only untangle it. "Wh—I mean, explain it to me. I still don't understand."

"Ever hear of entropy, kid?"

Dipper had read his science books. "That's just like, you know, the principle that things run down."

Now Bill was starting to flicker with what Dipper recognized as weariness. "Light you are! Cakebox cahoots chaos I mean is the opposite, let things run forever wild and wildcard weirder!"

Dipper held up his hand, and the yellow triangle drooped as much as anything possessing only ten molecules could. "I need arrest a roust a _rest!_ Let me take five."

That became the pattern—only later could Dipper assemble the bits and pieces of Bill Cipher's account into some coherent flow. The next time, Bill said, "Horroracle is just what we call him in my dimension. He's gone by many names in many dead dimensions—Terminus, Ras-Buralneek, Zerst, Al-Maut, Az-Ry'el, many others. Most of them, lore or mess, mean 'Destroyer.' You oughta be proud, Pine Tree—he always goes for a key spirit, a load-bearing soul. If he can pull it to pieces, everything else falls. He only gets one shot per dimension, and out of all the quintillions of possibilities in your set, he picked you."

It was an honor that Dipper could have done without.

When Dipper was silent for a while, Bill said, "Spill it, kid. We don't have all the time out of the world, you know!"

"I—I think I killed two people," he confessed in a small voice. He told Bill about Gideon and Deputy Durland, their horrific transformation and disintegration, about the corruption seeping out from what was left of them.

"You are not a murderer," Bill said firmly. "Take it from someone who knows."

"Yeah, but I asked the questions that did that to them!"

"Don't sweat it, Pine Tree—they're not dead _yet_. Right now they're just destroyed _potentially_. When all the coins go back to the Horroracle, then frozen time will thaw and the interdimension will collapse into your reality, and at that point they really will die, and rot will spread out from the charred bodies. With just two, it would take a billion billion years, but each new victim moves the timeline forward expotenially. I mean exponentially. With thirty—your dimension might have an Earth week, at the outside. Understand: when Earth goes, it all goes, stars go out, everything everywhere dies, universe goes dark, finito dorito. Pull down the certains, I mean curtains."

Another rest for Bill, and then Dipper said, "Tell me how we can fight him."

Each rest period had grown longer, Bill's spells of lucidity shorter. "Kid, I wish I knew! It would be easier to fight him if he'd picked on Mabel. The Horroracle can't stand randomness."

With a flicker of hope, Dipper said, "I could act randomly."

Bill's voice sounded both depressed and amused, if that were possible. "Not if your life depended on it, Dipper Pines. Which it does. Somehow you got to tabe the turnels."

"Bill, you're breaking up again—"

"Musn't datter. I mean doesn't matter. Listen! You got one hoop: this being descends on odor." The Mindscape itself was starting to flicker like a twilight landscape beneath nervous heat lightning. Bill quivered and said, "You're gonna wake up soon. Quick, listen! I said this being depends on order! It obeys rules! Visualize your reality—we call it Dimension 46—not as one thing but as a stack of pancakes infinitely high, OK? So your reality is one pancake, number *\ somewhere in the middle of the stack. Don't ask how an infinite stack can have a middle. I say it does, OK? Now, in an infinity of Dimension 46es, everything that can happen to each of you humans _does_ happen somewhere and somewhen, and that's impotent so dismember it. Ah, I wish I had more strength! Pine Tree, interested in a deal?"

Dipper nearly jerked awake, and everything dimmed before coming back into the strange focus of the Mindscape. "No! Bill, if you're trying to trick me—"

"I'm not! But I will if you give me a trance to cry, that's my nature, so don't give me the chance! I'll help you regardless, 'cause if this reality goes _boosh,_ then I'm wiped out, too, can't get it together anywhere else, but if we can somehow deat the Bestroyer, then I got a chance of gaining strength and dumping to my own jimension, get it? So here's the deal: I'll do all I can to help. In return, take whatever it is off the mop of ty remains. I'm setty prure it's hiding at least meven more solecules, maybe more. Help me get there. Ifwhen I get it together I'll leave this universe and neverever come come back back back back . . . ." his voice faded into echoes.

And Dipper opened his eyes to the monochrome madness of the interdimension. His mouth felt dry as Sahara sand, his eyes burned, and his stomach rumbled. How long had it been since he'd had even a sip of water? He tried to lick his lips, and his tongue felt as if it had been carved from a rough-textured wood. _Man, I wish I'd had just one more Pitt Cola at the dance. That seems so long ago now! Wendy . . . gotta concentrate._

Tabe the turnels. Bill meant _turn the tables_ , obviously, but how to do that with the Horroracle? Maybe he could risk one more coin to ask that question—but what if the creature chose Wendy? Or Mabel?

 _No, no, that's the wrong way to think! I can't chance losing anybody! I can't risk anyone's life—can't do it! That's not who I am!_

But—then who _was_ he? One thirteen-year-old boy, scared, alone and slowly drying up from thirst, already feeling shaky with hunger. If only Bill could have been clearer, if he could have hung on for just a little longer! "Bill, if you're there, show yourself."

A faint flicker of yellow, nothing more. _The effort of getting me into the Mindscape must have exhausted him._

Dipper plodded back to the Shack. Wendy still stood in mid-stride, dressed out for exercise and a run, her gym bag with her regular clothes and her boots in her hand. For a short while Dipper stood just staring at her. "I am so sorry," he whispered. Then he went inside the Shack, wishing he could just crack the Journals for ten minutes, for just one, to search for some clue, some hint.

 _Turn the tables._

Stack of pancakes. His stomach growled.

 _Wish Bill had chosen a different metaphor! Maybe something not related to food!_

Dipper paused at the foot of the stairs, then changed his mind and went to the vending machine instead. _I can open doors. This is a door. If the Horroracle operates by rules, maybe—_

He tapped in the code, and the vending machine swung out to reveal the hidden stair leading down to Stanford Pines's laboratory rooms—much more complex than the part of the Shack on the surface indicated. Unfortunately, the light switch proved immovable. Dipper would have to depend on the low light of the cracks and crevices that had been opened during Weirdmageddon—they must let a little illumination through.

So they did, though he had to pause at the foot of the stairs to let his eyes adjust. And then the elevator, of course, was out of commission, but an emergency hatch— _A hatch is a kind of door—_ swung open at his tug to reveal a ladder going down.

All gray down here, too. Dipper went all the way down to the Portal Room, in near-complete darkness, where Stanley had pulled his long-lost brother in from other dimensions— _Not even one of ours, not even Dimension 46-1 or 46-12,999,703, or even 46**\\._

One corner of the ceiling had been broken out—Dipper remembered when he had fallen through from the surface, chasing a lost thirty-eight-sided die—and that barely gave enough dimness to let him sort of see and sort of grope his way around.

Stanford had torn apart the Portal, though. No escape that way—

Wait a minute. In all the grayness Dipper glimpsed a slow pulse of reddish light, in a far, recessed corner. He made his way over fallen timbers and toppled stone—the Portal had caused serious gravitational disruptions when it came to full operating strength—and saw that the light came from a platform atop some kind of generator. A stool had been pulled up near the thing, as if an operator had sat in front of the generator at some point. The light wasn't from a fixture at all, but was a flickering field only twenty inches or so tall, and the light was very dim.

And the field was in the shape of an inverted equilateral triangle.

"Prototype," Dipper muttered. It had to be—Stanford and his assistant Fiddleford McGucket almost always designed devices first with math, then with sketches, then a rough mock-up assembly, and finally, if the device's actual functioning was vital—and when he'd built it, Stanford had believed the Portal was vital—then a working prototype.

Dipper tried to move the stool closer, couldn't budge it, and sat on it anyway, leaning to get at the platform, trying to see in the faint light of the triangular glow. There should be a lever somewhere. He felt around in the gloom and finally found something that had to be the power lever. Back for off, forward for full power, and it was barely out of the off position.

 _I can open doors. And this is a door to other dimensions._

Clenching his teeth, Dipper eased the lever forward. At first he thought it was as immobile as anything else in this interdimension, but then he realized it only had the reluctance of something that had not been used in over thirty years. It moved with the squeal of a hinge long left unoiled, and the flickering reddish triangle grew brighter. Wondering whether or not it functioned like the full-sized one, Dipper tried to find something to toss into the flashing triangle.

He couldn't pick up a pencil or even a fragment of rubble.

However—he took off his headband and holding it so a loop protruded, cautiously eased that into the light.

The loop vanished as though cut by a razor. Dipper pulled it back. It looked undamaged and smelled of nothing. He put the headband back on. _I can't fit through._

 _Well—not all of me._

Experimentally, he thrust his hand into the light. It vanished up to the elbow. He waved his hand around on the other side. Nothing. It didn't feel particularly cold or hot, just—average.

 _I have to do this. I have to try everything. Even if it kills me._

 _Wait. If it does kill me, the interdimension will never collapse! The real universe won't be destroyed, but it'll be frozen forever. That's the same as destruction. The Horroracle wins either way._

 _But—I have to try. I have to._

Dipper leaned down and took a deep breath before forcing his head and shoulders through the mini-Portal. He opened his eyes—

Color! Sounds!

 _I'm—somewhere._

It seemed to be a forest, or something like a forest. The sounds, a lot like fingernails on a chalkboard, might be insect or even bird sounds—or insectoids and birdoids.

Purple things that looked somewhat akin to trees (although with hexagonal trunks and limbs coming out of them at absolutely regular intervals, each limb exactly like every other one, the leaves on them perfect circles and a brilliant scarlet) came out of something that looked like the ground (if the ground were made of yellow, orange, and red marbles).

"Hello!" Dipper yelled. "Anybody, please help!"

The skreeky sounds—bird-equivalent songs, most likely—abruptly ceased, then after a moment began again, very tentatively.

"Help!" Dipper shouted again as loudly as he could.

"Mkblrgl vsztl mtppt?"

Well, it must have been a language, anyway. "Here!" Dipper yelled, working his right arm through and waving at nothing. He felt a building pressure—this other dimension was trying hard to pull him in. He hooked his feet through the rungs in the immovable stool.

And someone—somebeing—came into sight. It was orange with a wrinkly, rugose texture, vaguely conical, with a roundish yellow-tinged head, if it was a head, on the top, and it squirmed over the ground on a group of writing green tentacles. More tentacles, these purple, wriggled and waved from the place where the head sat atop the body. Dark spots on the head formed, winked out, and reformed—eyes, maybe.

The creature came slithering over to Dipper and stood some ten feet away, the part of the head facing him suddenly dotted with eight of the eyespots. "Zstkrm! Lptlkrst dmtkrz vz!"

Like an American tourist in a small town in France, Dipper said loudly and very slowly, "Hi. My name is Dipper Pines. I'm not from around here. I am from another dimension. Please give me water."

And like a French person so addressed, the creature said in its own language what might be the equivalent of _Imbecile américain, ne criez à moi!_

With his hand Dipper mimed drinking. The yellowish head bobbed and tilted. With one of the tentacles sprouting from the place where it should have had a neck, the creature imitated his motion, indicating another tentacle that did not have a gripper, but the funnel-like end of an open tube. "Bzlmp kwvtz?"

"Buzzleump quizzit!" Dipper said.

All the eyespots blinked, and the creature creaked "Kp! Kp! Kp!"

"You're laughing at my accent," Dipper said. "Water! Glug-glug-glug ahhh!"

"Glglglg khhh? G! Glglglg khhh! Prwptr!"

Dipper mimed again. The creature slithered out of sight.

Trying to gauge exactly where he was in this new world, Dipper twisted, gawking around. It looked as if his arm, shoulders, neck, and head, were sprouting directly from the trunk of one of the purple trees. "Great. I'm a hunting trophy. So that's a thing, I guess."

He heard the squashy sound of tentacles moving, and the creature came back into view. One of its neck tentacles gripped something that was a deep, deep blue—and it was shaped like a sphere with a long neck. The thing came very cautiously up to Dipper and held this out. "Glglglg khhh."

Dipper hesitated.

The creature encouragingly tilted the bottle, if it was a bottle, and poured a thin stream of what certainly looked like water into the opening of its feeding, or drinking, or whatever, tube. It said, "Khhh!"

"Okay," Dipper said, reaching out his hand.

The bottle was surprisingly heavy, as though made out of some dense metal. Dipper squeezed his eyes shut, held the neck to his mouth, and braced himself to spit.

But what flowed from the bottle was water. Unmistakably water. Oh, it tasted as though it had a touch of salt in it, and a sprinkle of sulfur, and maybe a few drops of vinegar, but at the moment it was the best thing he had tasted in what felt like years. He drank until he had to catch his breath and then said, "Ahhhh!"

"Khhhhh!" agreed the alien.

"Thank you," Dipper said.

"Gdfh tnk dlk?"

"If any dimensional travelers show up in my world and need help, I'll give it to them," Dipper promised. He smiled, making the alien creature hastily retreat, withdrawing all its neck tentacles into its—carapace, maybe? Anyway, they vanished.

 _I'd better not ask for food. No telling what a different molecular structure would do to my guts._

But though he no longer felt thirsty, Dipper drank again, and then again, nearly draining the bottle. He held it out, and the creature very cautiously came just close enough to stretch out a tentacle and take it.

"Gotta go now," Dipper said. "Seriously, thank you." He grunted as he pulled away, back into the Portal. It was like fighting the tug of gravity when he was almost too tired to move, but he slowly gained momentum and at last managed it.

In Dimension 49#/!, young Dkhprpnz blinked his eyespots at the place where the monster had appeared and disappeared. Reaching into its vz, it retrieved its Jrnzl and hastily began to write: _Dzk vkmn st v mkrgl srk! Vk mbzt "Glglglg khhh!" Twk rfg sktrv?_ It was yet one more mystery to investigate in Kwqrd Pkllz.

On the other side of the mini-Portal, Dipper, no longer aching with thirst and feeling somewhat steadier, pulled the lever back, dimming the triangle and—probably—reducing the power to an extent that made the passage between dimensions impossible.

"Turn the tables," Dipper said. "I have to find a way of doing that." He took the coins from his pocket and held them close enough to the ruddy glow to see them. He sorted them out: Mabel, Wendy, Stanley, Stanford, Fiddleford, Soos, Melody. Pacifica, Lazy Susan, Manly Dan, Tambry, Robbie, Lee.

Thirteen that he absolutely would not lose.

Maybe—he groaned as he thought it, but he did think it—maybe he could risk some of the others to get answers.

According to Bill, everything the Horroracle predicted would come true. But according to Bill, everything the being said was a lie.

It sounded almost like a normal day for Gravity Falls.

If only the fate of everyone and everything didn't depend on it.

"I have to try," Dipper told himself.

He forced himself to climb the long ladder back up the stairs. He knew just one more spot in town where there was color—in the sign over the doorway.

 _ **Magick Shop.**_


	8. Chapter 8

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 8: It's a Terrible Life**

The strain was telling on him. Dipper felt shaky and unsure of himself, so tired he wanted to sleep forever—the rest he'd had in the Mindscape hadn't seemed like real sleep at all.

And yet he walked back through the eerie silence, through the grayness, into town. The Magick Shop, with its red sign, still stood there in plain sight—and around the corner the Gravity Falls PD prowl car continued slowly to crumble away, streaks of decay now spreading. Deputy Durland's blackened and crusted right arm had melted into the charred surface of the door—it was no longer possible to see where the arm ended and the corrupted metal began.

Dipper slowly circled the block. Nothing else had changed. According to Bill, nothing else _could_ change. Not until all the coins were gone.

Unwillingly he dragged his feet up the steps to the door. Smoothly and without noise it opened inward, into darkness. Dipper thought he was going to pass out—his pumping blood roared in his ears, and he felt strangely cold as he took his first step over the threshold. He swallowed what felt like some small living thing desperately trying to crawl up from his stomach into his throat. "I'm here," he said.

An indistinct form materialized from the darkness, or perhaps it had been there already and his eyes had just become accustomed enough to make out the shape. It reminded him oddly of the Society of the Blind Eye, a tall thin figure in a hooded robe—except this robe was the color of midnight, not red. He couldn't see any arms or legs—a head, certainly, though concealed in the hood, and the dark robe dropping almost straight down from that, with little hint of shoulders. The figure did not move or speak.

"I know who you are," Dipper said, hearing the trembling note in his own voice. "They call you Destroyer. And—and Az-ry'el and Zerk. And Horroracle."

The figure stood—perhaps hovered, it was hard to see—without making a sound or acknowledging the words.

"You have rules," Dipper said. "You chose me because I have questions and you think I can't help asking them. But I don't want your answers. The price is too high. I know what will happen. I can't let it happen."

Still nothing.

"If I die in here, then you win nothing."

Then—not a laugh, more a feeling—a suggestion of superior amusement. And a voice that seemed to be only in his mind, not in his ears. N _o. It has already begun. Your dimension will run down. It may take trillions of years and the progress will be slow, but it will run down from what you have already started. You have lost already_.

Dipper tried to summon his courage, but to himself his voice still came out squeaky and fearful: "I don't think so. If that were true, you could just kill me, but you can't— _ghh_!"

Huge, ice-cold fingers had closed on his throat, cutting off his air. He felt himself lifted off the ground, dangling, helpless as a rag doll, legs kicking uselessly. The hood loomed before him—was the hand, if it was a hand, even attached to it? It didn't seem to be.

Dipper felt his eyes swelling as the cloaked being stared at him indifferently, the way a man might glance curiously at a bug he had accidentally stepped on down there on the sidewalk. _You are mistaken._

The fingers let him fall, the hand vanishing, and Dipper collapsed on his back, gagging and retching. The being had stared at him, into him—

 _But it had no eyes_. No face. Inside the hood swam emptiness and bitter despair, like unearthly fish restless in a transparent bowl.

Struggling to sit up, rubbing his throat, Dipper croaked, "Why are—no, you're tricking to try me!" He blinked, wondering if Bill's messed-up way of speaking might have rubbed off on him—but no, the Horroracle _was_ tricking him to test whether or not he would ask a question. Dipper said, "I won't play it your way! You say you could kill me, but you didn't—and you can't! Because you're stuck here, too. And if—if I can find the right way to do it, you'll have to leave this set of dimensions! And what you're saying can't happen!"

The being backed away. _Set of dimensions?_

"That's a question!" Dipper snapped, scrambling to his feet. "You made the rules! To answer, I'll take Gideon Gleeful!"

The white streak came hissing through the air and nearly whipped past him, but Dipper made a desperate lunge for it and with a yellow flash of pain behind his eyes, he felt a bone in his hand crack as he grabbed the coin. "Y-yeah," he groaned, sweat popping out on him. "Set of dimensions! I know ours is just one of an infinite number, all of them related and all depending on this one! And I know you can be beat!"

Now all emotion drained, and the voice, or the imagined voice, was dead flat: _Not . . . by you._

"You have no one else to play against!"

 _You are thinking to sacrifice yourself by refusing the game. You know that if you do not ask questions, you will soon die as you puny mortals do, from thirst and hunger, and you believe that such a sacrifice will make things better again. Look and see how wrong you are._

The scene changed without transition. At first Dipper didn't know where he was. He was not used to hovering off the floor and looking down on the rooms in the Mystery Shack. Then he realized he was in the attic, but floating way up near the ceiling, staring at his room, his bed, his . . . body, lying on his bed in a fetal position, looking miserably shriveled and wasted. He heard a commotion from outside the door: Stan, yelling, "No, don't go in there!"

And Mabel, running, hurling herself on the bed beside Dipper's inert form, throwing her arms around the body. "No, Dipper! Don't be dead!" she shrieked. "Oh, don't be dead!"

Then everything dissolved, and he was . . . somewhere else. A hospital, it looked like. He saw a bed, and just leaving the room—Mom and Dad, both weeping. Like a ghost, Dipper swept through the closed door and saw—Mabel, stretched out and unconscious in the bed, both of her arms heavily bandaged. But she looked a few years older, eighteen or nineteen.

Two nurses, one old, one young, changing an IV drip. One of them said, "Her poor parents. This is the third time she's tried."

"Why's she so depressed? She's a pretty girl."

"Mental problems. Something about a brother."

And again, without moving, he was in another place. A dim and terrible room. Beige walls thick with padding. A woman lying in a corner, wearing a hospital gown, no shoes, legs stick-thin and twisted, peppered with bedsores, arms and chest wrapped in a strait jacket. Dipper didn't recognize the gaunt, wild-eyed face, not with her head shaved almost bare. He did not know his own sister until she whispered in a crooning, lunatic voice hoarse and rusty and pathetic, "Don't be dead, Dipper. Don't be dead."

And then he was outside, in a forest. A hulking man in jeans and flannel shirt was watching a helicopter take off, one of the medevac type with a stretcher above the skids, and when it had tilted and droned away over the treetops like a gigantic dragonfly, he punched a number into a cell phone and waited.

Finally he said, "Dan? Steve here. I said I'd call as soon as—yeah, it's, well, it's real bad, Dan. Well, they came, but." He coughed and cleared his throat. "There was nothing they could do. They're bringing her body back to you, Dan. I'm sorry."

A pause. "Yeah, I was so surprised last year when she just sudden-like dropped out of school and signed on here at the lumber camp. She used to be so good at everything. But—Dan, all the months she's worked, she never paid attention. I mean, she went through the motions like a zombie or something. It was like she was just waitin' for an accident like this to happen. Almost wantin' it. And when the tree started to fall, they say she didn't even move. Dan, let me know if—Dan? Dan, you there?" He sighed and thumbed the hang-up icon on his phone.

And another scene, this one brief: snow on the ground, the Shack, empty, deserted-looking with a forlorn, faded sign tacked on a post hammered into the frozen earth in front of it: CLOSED. FOR SALE.

And then under a cloudy sky a cemetery, with Ford standing all alone beside a freshly-filled grave, looking too old, his back bowed, his posture and expression those of a broken man.

Then without a sense of movement, he was back in the dim room with the robed figure hovering in the darkness near him, and his hand pulsed hot with pain.

The voice seemed to mock him. _You see your giving up will be for nothing. You cannot win by refusing to live._

Through gritted teeth, Dipper said, "But you can't win, either. It won't happen as quickly as you want it to."

The air seemed to thicken, like cotton in his throat. Dipper gasped for breath, backed away, found himself outside the door—and with an oddly vicious movement, it slammed silently. He stumbled down the steps and turned over his throbbing hand so it was palm-up. With an effort he unclenched it. On his swollen palm lay the Gideon coin.

He shook with the pulsating ache. His hand was swelling. If only he had some ice—

 _Ice. The Zodiac. Wendy. Someone—someone cool in the face of danger, great-uncle Ford said. And—and everyone had chanted, "Wen-dy! Wen-dy!" Gotta be—cool. Shake it off, dude. It's just one little bone. I'll know better next time._

But at the moment he knew he couldn't face a next time, not right now. Dipper thought fleetingly of walking to Gideon's house to check on him, but no, he couldn't face that either.

 _Would Mabel really lose her mind?_

Dipper caught himself, half-expecting a demand for a coin and a contemptuous answer—but none came. Just thinking a question didn't count. He had to speak it. Still— _I need to get out of the habit of questions!_

 _I can't believe that Wendy would just . . . give up like that. She's such a fighter. It's not like her. Unless—unless she cares for me—more than I'd thought. More than I hoped._

 _And Soos is at home in the Shack. It's the one place where he felt a family's love. He couldn't just walk out on it, let it be sold. Unless he were in the grip of despair._

 _But of course Stanley and Stanford are the real owners. They'd never sell the Shack from under Soos. Unless—they couldn't bear to live in Gravity Falls any longer, unless Soos just didn't want the job any more. But even then—_

 _But Stanley must have died, and Ford looked as if he didn't care about anything at all—_

"Everything he predicts will come true," Bill had said.

 _There's something—something that's wrong about all this. I'm not thinking right. It's somehow wrong logically. But I'm so tired. Need food. I could figure it out if I weren't so hungry and—and tired._

 _Mabel. Wendy. Soos. Stanley and Stanford._ Dipper couldn't stand to think of any of them, or about all of that. Nor at the moment could he stand the thought of returning to the still, silent, memory-haunted Mystery Shack.

Which left . . . .

An hour later, he sank down on the ground and stared at the Bill Cipher effigy. "Here I am again," he said.

The yellow flicker seemed a little bit brighter.

"I saw the Horroracle. Spoke to it. I won back one of the two coins I've already lost. But I don't think I can do that again. And it broke my hand." Dipper lay down, feeling the pulsation of pain. "Bill, I have to rest. But I'm starving. I found a way to get water—once, anyhow. I'm not sure it would work with food. I need ideas. I wish I had the Journals!"

He closed his eyes and tried to will himself to sleep. Just when he thought it wasn't working, he rubbed his eyes for a moment and then opened them on the disorienting grayscale vista of the Mindscape.

Bill floated nearby. "Rough time, Pine Tree?"

"Yeah," Dipper said.

"I can help that hand. Trust me?"

The pain throbbed and burned, and reluctantly, Dipper said, "I guess so."

"Stretch it out."

Dipper held out his bloated, aching hand, and Bill floated near enough to touch it with a bottom corner of his minuscule triangle. Dipper felt a flash of warmth—not painful, searing heat, but comforting. And the pain eased. Before his eyes, the swelling went down dramatically, and he felt a little _click._

"There," Bill said. "Bone's mended. Must've been hit hard—it snapped right in two, and that's an unusual break."

"But the break isn't fixed in the real world. Only in the Mindscape," Dipper said.

"Well, yes and no. The good news is that you aren't in your real body either here or in the interdimension. If you'd managed to get back to your own dimension and your own body, I think it would have the damage that you took in the interdimension—I mean, your hand really would be broken in the, what do they call it, physical plane. But no, I don't think it will be now, because your mended bone should go back with you from the Mindscape into the interdimension and then into your dimension, if you can figure a way to deal with the Horroracle."

"I thought I'd just wait it out until I starved to death," Dipper said. "But the Horroracle warned me that if I do, terrible things will happen to my family and my friends."

"I'm listening," Bill said.

Dipper told him what the Horroracle had said. "Hm," Bill replied. "Makes you feel like Jimmy Stewart, doesn't it?"

"Wh—I mean I don't understand that."

"Heart-warming old movie, they show it a lot at Christmas time in your world. Gives me disgusting amounts of gas, but to each his own. Seriously, kid, don't off yourself like that. It's a bad idea and won't do anybody good. I can totally see Shooting Star losing it if you just let yourself die, and I'm not surprised that Red might find life not worth living. See, kid, they have feelings, which are things I don't fully understand, but they're powerful. Now, I'm gonna start fading out in a minute, so quick, tell me how you won back one of the coins."

Dipper explained: "I surprised him into asking a question, and then before I answered, I demanded payment. The coin's what broke my hand."

"Interesting," Bill said. "The Horroracle's all about order. And order needs rules. Somethink to thing about, Pipper Dines. I'm slipping. Rot a guest."

While Bill recovered, Dipper experimentally closed and opened his hand. Everything worked, though he felt a residual ache, and his palm had a nasty round purple bruise that still felt tender. He closed his fist on pain and wished that he could have a chance of striking the Horroracle.

After too long a time, Bill said, "I think I can make sense again. I wish I had another twenty-seven molecules! Listen, Pine Tree, his predictions will come true, but not necessarily in your here-and-now. And he lies! Worse than I do, and I'm the second-place runner-up to your great-uncle Stanley! OK, you know you can regain coins if you make him ask questions. Figure out a way to use that. And kid, if it looks like you're losin' it all, remember this: If the worst does happen, you'll find yourself briefly in the Mindscape, and before you slip away, look for me. I know you have no reason to trust me. I wouldn't trust me, either. But if you lose, I lose, too, so—not a friendship but a truce, OK? How's the hand?"

"Better," Dipper said. "Still hurts a little."

"Yeah, sorry about that. It's hard to undo that kind of damage completely. Anyway, you see that I _can_ help. I promise you I _will_ help if you'll trust me. It's asking a lot, but you've got a lot to lose. Remember."

"I'll remember," Dipper said.

"OK, kid. Now my best advice: Go back to that teeny portal and see if you can communicate with the alien thingy. Mime that you need food. If the water won't kill you, the food's probably safe, too, though I wouldn't be surprised if it tastes like the kind of things Waddles drops around the Shack. Oh, one other thing—remember, if you get back to your own dimension, visit my remains here and clear the hat. You do that, and we're steven-even, quall it kits, and when I mather my gollycules, I'll be out of hoor yair. Until you hinish with the Forroracle, you probably shouldn't come back to the Mindscape unless you have to. I don't have much left, and I sotta gave it."

Bill drifted away, diminishing _—_ or Dipper was growing larger, he couldn't tell which. Dipper lay for a time in the Mindscape, pondering and getting nowhere. Then at last, feeling empty and frightened and terribly lonely, he forced himself to wake up and drag himself back to the Mystery Shack and to his great-uncle Ford's secret laboratory.

When he reactivated the miniature Portal and leaned in again, he found himself in the exact place in the exact same alien forest—as far as he could tell, since all the trees looked identical—as before. He heard a strange kind of repeating, chiming chirp and stretched his neck until he could see the source, a square emerald-colored box strapped to the hexagonal tree trunk just above where his shoulders, arm, and head protruded.

 _Huh. It's an alarm! That's the kind of thing I'd rig up if I'd sighted a cryptid in the woods near the Shack. That might mean—_

It did mean. The bizarre cone-shaped creature hurried into view, making excited squeaky sounds as its slithering green tentacles writhed their way over the strange, marbly ground. It stopped a few feet away and held up something oval and ruby-colored. Dipper heard some snicking sounds. "You're taking my picture!" he said.

His exclamation startled the creature so much that it lost its hold on the device, which fell to the ground and—broke. It fell into two pieces. The creature quivered, bleating "K'lp! K'lp!" in obvious distress.

Dipper understood at once. "I see your problem. Look at me. Hey, look here!"

When the eyespots formed and focused on him, Dipper pointed at the broken camera and held up one finger. He shook his head. "No. One is bad. One is bad." Then he held up four fingers, smiled and nodded. "Always bring backups!"

"Hz? Tmp vr'kl mnk swtfggl! Nk n! Vr!"

"Right—I guess. Uh—glglglg? Nom, nom, nom?"

He flinched—did those count as questions?

Nothing happened. _Because right now I'm in a different stack of pancakes!_ he thought. _A whole different infinity of dimensions!_

The creature must have anticipated his return. It offered another flask of water, which Dipper drank gratefully, and then opened a kind of hexagonal pouch and held it out. It contained something very much like rainbow-colored spaghetti. Except the noodles moved in a slow, writhing way. The conical creature opened its feeding tube and dropped a couple in. "Nm-nm" it said encouragingly.

"Well—I asked for it." Dipper caught up a few of the squirmy noodles and popped them in his mouth, smiling in a sickly kind of way. He munched. They tasted like—well, like—it was hard to think of what they tasted like. A little like persimmons, a squashy fruit that has the texture of loose cotton and makes your mouth pucker from its bitter undertaste. A little bit like a banana already gone black in the peel and mushy on the tongue.

But not so bad that they made Dipper gag. He ate all of the noodles and then washed them down with more water. "Thank you," he said. He pointed. "The alarm was a good idea!" He nodded and smiled. "Next time bring four cameras!" He pointed to the broken ruby-colored device.

The creature touched it with one of its tentacles, then held up four tentacles.

"What do you know!" Dipper said. "We're communicating, sort of. Let me try this." He pointed to himself. "Dipper Pines," he said. He repeated it three times.

"Dprpnz," the creature finally said. It quivered with what sure looked like excitement and pointed at itself and said, "Dkhprpnz!"

"Oh, that's—wait, what? I'm Diprpinz," Dipper said, trying to twist his tongue around the alien words. "And you are, uh, Dikhipirpinz? Nearly the same!"

"Pk! Pk!" the alien creature said, sounding both excited and pleased.

"Uh—Mystery Twins?" Dipper asked, holding out his fist.

The alien stared at it, then offered the water flask.

"Never mind. Gotta go now. Thanks for the food!"

He pulled back with difficulty, leaving Dkhprpnz to open his Journal and with feverish haste note down the need to bring not one, but four hkmzmr the next time the interdimensional beggar showed up.


	9. Chapter 9

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 9: High Noon**

Dipper wished he had pens and paper. When anything came up, he always wanted to make a plan—and to write it down while thoughtfully chewing on a pen, sometimes to the extent of drinking its ink, like a ballpoint vampire. Words seem to nail his thoughts in place and keep them from wandering. In school his ace subject was math—he was already well into college-level calculus without even being in high school yet—but he also got high marks for composition.

Mabel did, too, but her teachers praised her imagination and her ability to come up with wild, funny, impossible stories. Only Dipper knew they were all true, factual accounts of all the things that had happened to her in Gravity Falls. Once their teacher had given back one of her essays marked, "This is such a good story about the merman who marries a manatee! I think Disney should make a movie of it. But, Mabel, the assignment was to write a description of the most memorable person you've met. This is fiction, and it should be fact. Try again."

Mabel's next try was a very lifelike word portrait of Grunkle Stan, and the teacher this time wrote on the paper, "I give up. This has to be fiction, too, but you get an A for being able to dream up such preposterous characters."

Dipper, on the other hand, scored solid A's by doing the assignments just as they should be done. And once the teacher had given him a note that puzzled him: "This is excellent, but I wish some of Mabel's imagination would rub off on you."

 _I sure could use a little of that now. Oh, I wish I could write this in my Journal, or at least put it on paper!_ Instead, he had to do it all in his head. He went to the bonfire log and sat there, with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting in his hands, remembering the times when Wendy sat beside him. _She's depending on me. They all are. Only they just don't know it and probably never will._

It all went around and around in Dipper's mind, nothing settling, nothing settled. At last he sighed deeply and thought, _There is no good way out of this for me._

In his despair, Dipper thought that maybe Bill was right—maybe being chosen as the target of an unimaginably dangerous and powerful interdimensional destroying angel made him special, but it sure didn't feel that way. It felt horrible and it felt like he was bound to let everybody down. Like no matter what he tried, he would fail. He would always fail against such a superior foe.

He tried to inventory his strengths and came up with a disappointingly small number, none of which seemed to offer any hope of help.

So—on to the enemy's weaknesses. First, the Horroracle had bound itself to live by its own twisted but rigid rules. Second, it had a knowledge of the future. Everything it predicted came true— _wait a second_! _Let me think, let me think. There's something here, something maybe I can use._

Dipper closed his eyes and pretended he was writing an entry in his Journal:

 _The Horroracle is some kind of prophet of doom. OK. But I'm not sure that he's always right. Think it through._

 _Bill claimed to know the future, too! He told Soos he could predict the exact time and date of his death—and he did make a couple of small prophecies that came true. He said he'd do an impression of me as I would be in about three seconds, and he pretty much nailed that._

 _But—big but—if he could foresee everything that would happen, that meant everything HAD to happen. His knowing that I would wake up scared and yelling wasn't just a shrewd guess, but the result of his actually seeing me do that when he gazed into the future. And if I had to wake up that way, then there could be no guess, no question of chance and no—what's the term? No free will. If everything is set in stone, then human decisions don't matter!_

 _But they DO MATTER! Because Grunkle Stan and great-uncle Ford successfully fooled Bill. If he could see all that would happen, they couldn't have done it! And he would have known not to go into Stan's mind—he should have foreseen that if he could have, because everything he wanted depended on his entering Ford's mind!_

 _So the future is not determined, and we can change things. But if the Horroracle always tells the truth—OK, OK, I think I'm getting it._

 _I think I see what Bill was telling me now. In some horrible version of our dimension (and there are infinite versions, Bill says), Mabel does lose her mind—but maybe only in that ONE! And the same goes for Wendy's dying in a lumberjack accident, maybe in a whole different version from Mabel's! And the Shack closing, and all the rest, they may happen in still different versions!_

 _But if human decisions make a difference, and I believe they do, then all the things the Horroracle showed me don't HAVE to occur in my version of the dimension at all._

 _I CAN CHANGE THE OUTCOMES!_

 _So if, as Bill says, things come to the worst—if I lose it all, even my life—maybe I can at least fix it so that none of the Horroracle's bad prophecies will come true. Have to think of a way._

 _But first I have to come up with a way to use the Horroracle's weakness against him. I wish I had the gang's help, the way everyone teamed up against Bill! But on the other hand, Bill had his posse of weridos, and the Horroracle seems to be alone by choice, so it's—what is it? Mano a mano or something. Him against me. Just the two of us. Showdown at High Noon, as Dad says sometimes about meetings at work._

 _Except it's not a fair showdown, it's the town sheriff with a popgun and the gunslinger with an AK-45._

 _The Horroracle's had so much more experience._

 _So maybe the key is finding something he hasn't experienced yet. I have to be spontaneous. But there is no way of planning to be spontaneous! I need some of Mabel now. Need to get this guy seriously off-balance._

 _I doubt I can take him out or even hurt him physically. I remember what happened when I tried to punch Bill right in the eye. Did not work out so well._

 _So the challenge will be something mental. Can't imitate Mabel, it should be Grunkle Stan. A con job. The perfect trick._

 _If only I knew what that could be!_

The trouble was—he didn't. After what felt like hours in the bonfire clearing, all Dipper could do was see flashes of Wendy in his mind's eye. The first time she'd kissed him. The first time they'd danced. How beautiful she was in that silly '50s costume. How he wished they could run side by side just one more time, with her joking and urging him on.

Dipper felt so lonely that he went back to the Shack and to Mabel's room and sat beside her on the bed, which felt hard as a board. He smiled at her as she lay immobile in sleep. "You always used to get up before I did," he told her quietly. "Practically every morning at home you'd come flying into my room and jump onto my bed and kick me out onto the floor because you got so excited about things. Even opening a box of cereal and finding a plastic whistle made you go all cray-cray. I guess we're not little kids anymore. I miss us, Mabel. I miss us so much."

Her right hand, fingers curled, lay on top of the cover. Dipper made a fist and gently bumped it. "Mystery Twins." He smiled sadly. "I know you remember how I used to hate that when you started doing it. I'd give anything to do it with you again. Even if I knew it would be the very last time."

Though he was no longer hungry or thirsty, and though he had dozed and visited the Mindscape, he felt as if he had no energy left.

He lay down and stretched out on the bed next to Mabel with one arm around her immobile body and after a long time he fell asleep.

The next—day? Time had no meaning. When, after what felt like a long and dreamless sleep, Dipper woke up, he was hungry and thirsty again, though feeling rested. He went down to Ford's lab and used the mini-Portal to revisit the other dimension. Again the alarm sounded.

This time Dkhprpnz brought four hkmzmr instead of one, and he clicked away happily with each of them in turn—Dipper felt like the subject of an interdimensional papparazo. His alien counterpart must have taken sixty or more pictures in quick succession.

Again Dipper ate and drank and then afterward, with some uncomfortable twisting he squeezed his left hand through the Portal as well as his right—he had to pull back a little way to do it—and mimed writing. It took many tries, but at last Dkhprpnz took something a little like an octagonal book from a fold of its skin? Clothing? and a sort of stylus and scribbled.

 _Oh, yeah. He's got a Journal. I should've guessed he'd have a Journal._

He showed Dipper the result, in a script that of course Dipper could not decipher, and he nodded and reached out—but the alien protectively drew its journal back. It mumbled some buzzings and k-sounds and slithered away, holding up a tentacle.

 _I hope he means to wait! But I hope it's not for long. If I start to get pulled through, I can't grab onto something in my own dimension._

In a few moments the creature returned, holding some sheets of—well, some paperoid substance, though it felt more like aluminum foil, and a stylus with a strange corkscrew shaft—suited for tentacles, not so much for fingers. The creature helpfully let Dipper rest this on its version of a Journal, and hastily, Dipper scrawled:

* * *

 _If I don't come through this alive, here's my last request: Mabel, if I die, it's so everybody else, and I mean that, can live. You keep looking for your perfect romance. When you find your soul mate, marry them. Make a toast to me at the wedding reception. And I hope you have babies, preferably twins. Mystery Twins forever, Sis! I love you._

 _Wendy, I don't know why it's so hard to say that I love you, but you know that I do. Don't grieve for me. I got into this whole mess by accident, but I'm seeing it through by my own choice. Now pay attention, Lumberjack Girl! You stay in school and finish! You go on to college, like you've talked about doing! And when you find some guy you love, make him as happy as you've made me._

 _Please say goodbye to them all for me—Soos and Melody, Abuelita, especially Ford and most especially Stan. Heck, go ahead and tell Pacifica goodbye for me. And don't feel too bad. Most kids my age haven't lived half as much as I did in the Mystery Shack and in Gravity Falls. I mean, think of me, but don't waste your lives on it. One day I hope I'll see you again. Love forever, Dipper_

* * *

He returned the stylus and Journal and extra sheets to Dkhprpnz and smiled his thanks. Then, hoping he could hang onto the paper in his own dimension, he pulled back through.

The single sheet of paper suddenly seemed very, very heavy. He lugged it up the ladder, up the stairs, then up to the attic and dropped it on his bed. It landed hard but without a sound, and not to his surprise, Dipper discovered he could no longer pick it up or even move it. Well, maybe Bill was right—maybe this, or a duplicate of it, would transfer to the real world when—when the time came. Maybe the people who mattered would see it, when that time did come.

And it would come soon now.

Dipper walked out of the Shack and turned toward town, toward the Magick Shop, and toward the Horroracle.

It was time to end this.

Time for the showdown.


	10. Chapter 10

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 10: Duel in the Dark**

"Let's just drop all the woo-woo mystery," Dipper said as soon as the Magick Shop door opened and, hands in his running-shorts pockets, he sauntered inside in what he hoped was a casual manner. "C'mon, I know you're there, you know I'm here. Show yourself."

And as if it had been there all along, in the dimness only a few feet away hung the robe, apparently in mid-air—though Dipper still couldn't be sure the creature wearing it had legs and feet or—just nothing. At any rate, in the uncertain dimness it certainly _looked_ as though it were floating, ghostwise.

"Hey, I think you must've been sick. I mean, you definitely look weaker," Dipper said, peering at what he could see of the creature. "Well, no wonder, staying cooped up in here, y'know. You probably need to get out more. Get a little exercise, watch your diet. I know this great place to eat."

The words, or the thought, came sudden, and cold as a knife of ice: _You are starving_.

"Nope, don't think so," Dipper said, slapping his stomach with his left hand. "I'll admit I'm eating things that look like live rainbow worms, but they keep me going. Don't taste all that bad, for worms, and one serving gets you through a whole day."

A pause, not a long one, but one that stank of uncertainty, and then the Horroracle said, _You lie._

"Never! Lying is against _my_ rules." Dipper sensed not only uncertainty then, but a quality of . . . uneasiness. The Horroracle was unsure and a tad concerned—not much, but maybe enough to give Dipper a little bit of an edge.

He thought perhaps the entity would have something to say, but when it didn't, Dipper went on: "You know, Hor'—I hope you don't mind if I call you Hor' for short, I do it with every ounce of respect you deserve—it occurs to me that if I just left this set of dimensions, just bailed on it, you'd be trapped here. See, I think you're bound to it until your game is over, one way or another."

 _I see the inevitable fate through to its inevitable end._

"Uh-huh, sure, whatever, dude. But in this case, if I went to another set of dimensions and stayed there for the rest of my life, you'd be stuck in this one, where time isn't moving. And the way I understand it, you need me to ask questions before you start it up again. Can't do it without me, can't choose anyone else. Those are the rules. You'd have the place all to yourself, for all eternity, but you couldn't get into it because time is stopped. You'd be here in the interdimension forever. Nice and quiet. Might be lonely, though."

 _You are attempting to reason about things you cannot possibly know, and your words are meaningless, since they posit an impossible event_.

"Wel-l-l, I suppose you _could_ take up some hobbies. The Sousaphone, maybe, that's relaxing. Or card games. On Earth we have over 2,000 variants of solitaire. That might take up a year or two."

Finally, Dipper felt a definite flare of anger from the Horroracle. _Enough! You cannot move to other dimensions. The physics of this dimensionality preclude that! You have no powers. You're merely a human child._

Firmly, Dipper countered, "Wrong! I _have_ been to another dimension since I saw you last. I get water and food there. Oh, and about those visions you showed me. I left a note for Mabel and Wendy, just in case. No matter what happens, they're warned now."

 _You lie! No such action is possible!_

"You can go to my room in the Mystery Shack if you want. Check it out. The note is right there on my bed."

 _You cannot do anything to alter the future! You cannot affect any changes here or in the material plane! Except for the two of us, I have placed everything in a condition of stasis!_

"Go and check it out," Dipper said again.

For the merest half-heartbeat of time the entity flickered. The surroundings vanished, and then they stood in Dipper's bedroom. The Horroracle said, _There is no note!_

Dipper looked at it. "Sure there is. Right there," he said, indicating it with his left forefinger.

The Horroracle flashed again, and they were back in the Magick Shop.

Dipper realized, _It's blind! It has to use my eyes! The Horroracle couldn't see the note until I was looking at it!_

"You don't know anything about us," Dipper said. "Only that you want us destroyed. You see now—I did write the note. And take my word for it, I can escape this—dimensionality any time I want!"

The entity was trembling in air with what seemed like barely suppressed fury. _How can you?—NO! I retra—_

"I'll answer and take Edwin Durland!" Dipper yelled, jerking his hand out of his pocket. He had removed his socks before approaching the Magick Shop, and he wore one over his right hand, with the other folded as a cushion inside it against his palm.

The coin would have knocked the wind out of him if it had struck his chest, where it had been aimed, but he got his hand up just in time and grunted from the impact. The socks reduced the shock—just enough so it did not re-break a bone—but it stung terribly.

He took a great, deep gulp of air and then said, "One of my relatives is a genius, Hor'. _He_ invented a way of traveling between dimensions—and maybe because it's already sort of in between dimensions, it hasn't been affected by your stasis spell or whatever. I can use it anytime. I can walk out on you."

Now the tone of the reply seemed cold again, distant: _Then go._

 _He's calling my bluff. Time for Plan B!_

 _But—there is no Plan B._

"OK. Enjoy your eternity," Dipper said, turning on his heel. He walked through the open door—

—and wound up facing the Horroracle again. It gloated now: _You cannot escape if I never let you leave._

"So we'll wind up Eternity Buddies," Dipper said, faking a cocky grin. "And you'll let me die of thirst and hunger, and then—oops, I won back the coins, so nothing happens to the dimensionality. You'll still be on your own, loser."

 _I will force you to ask a question!_

"No, I don't think so." _Bill used to be able to read minds, or it seemed like he could. I hope this thing can't see how scared I am._ "There's nothing stubborner than a teen-aged human boy. Ask anybody. Oh, right, you can't. So it's just you and me."

The Horroracle swept around him, just out of reach, hovering as it made a complete circle. Dipper turned on his heel to keep facing it. "You don't get anything out of this little hobby of yours," Dipper said. "You gain nothing from destroying worlds and universes. Maybe it's time to retire. You could just stop being the Destroyer. Maybe find something useful to do that will actually get you something."

 _I get peace,_ the Horroracle said, heavy words falling into place like spadefuls of earth onto the lid of a coffin.

"No, you get death. You've never had a family, I bet. You've never had a friend. And you never will have. I'd almost feel sorry for you if you hadn't picked me out of the blue to torment."

 _I do not accept your pity!_

Though Dipper couldn't be certain, he thought the entity seemed a little more solid now than it had been. Perhaps a little more bound to whatever was currently passing for reality.

"You're slowly becoming real," Dipper said aloud. "The longer you stay here, the more hooked into this dimension you become. And when you're finally lodged here and can't get away, then I may ask questions. Because then if everything ends, you end, too. No more worlds to conquer."

 _You are wrong!_

"No, I don't think so. Chew on what I said. I'm leaving now—and you can't stop me." Dipper turned again. The door hovered ahead, but it slammed. "Rules," Dipper said mockingly. "I can open doors."

And he did, quite easily.

Dipper knew something for a certainty: _He'll follow me now. He's dying to know where my Portal to another dimension is. That stupid door trick he just tried means he wants me to think that I've got away from him, but he'll follow me._

But before heading out of this—image, mock-up, reflection, whatever it was—of Gravity Falls, he walked around the block. There was the police car—but now Deputy Durland was whole and sound, dangling his arm out of the car and gazing out the passenger window with a goofy expression on his face, very life-like except for being without color.

Dipper said, "Lookin' good, Deputy. Lookin' good."

And with just a small quiver of satisfaction, Dipper thought, _There—I just felt a tremor in the air. A hostile vibration. A disturbance in the Force!_

Well, since the Shack was out—couldn't risk actually leading the entity anywhere too close to the Portal—there was only one place to go, and Dipper headed there. _God, give me strength. I've walked so far since all this started! I've probably earned three days off my exercise routine._

But then what he wouldn't give to run with Wendy—even if it was for just one final time, then say goodbye, close the book, let it be over forever. He tried to get that out of his mind, and, convinced that the Horroracle was trailing him, Dipper skirted round the back of the Shack, going through the woods instead of down the drive. _Wendy's standing frozen there. And I couldn't help looking at her, and I won't let this thing see her!_

He passed the bonfire log and cut through the woods. Before long he stood at the edge of the weedy spot where the Bill effigy stood tilted, hand in the air. Dipper almost smiled at the tiny little hummingbird nest on the top of the ridiculously elongated hat. So small, and like Bill, he couldn't budge it, not in this interdimension. Insignificant, really—but size was just a matter of scale. For all he knew, ten thousand of Bill's molecules might cluster beneath that quarter-sized nest.

Just to screw with the Horroracle—and since he had avidly read the copy of Journal 2 that Blendin Blandin had allowed him to retrieve—Dipper sat on the ground and began to intone "Juh-ah-ssem sdraw-kab," the key to summoning Bill. Typically for Bill, it consisted of repeating the words "backwards message" backwards.

Dipper thought, _Yeah! I can feel the Horroracle's interest focusing. It thinks I'm opening a Portal!_

Instead, inside his ear he heard a very faint humming voice: "Pine Tree, I can't materialize, or even project myself. You know it's here, don't you? It's invisible to human eyes, but it's spying on you. Just subvocalize to answer. It can't hear you and I can catch the drift."

Keeping his mouth closed and forming the words more in his mind than his mouth—and using only air, as if he were whispering—Dipper replied, "Yes, I know."

"Lure him back to your room, kid. I think I know what you're gonna try, but don't do it until you're sure he's with you. I'm gonna do a ride-along."

"OK."

Dipper closed his eyes and struck what he imagined to be a meditative pose, sitting on the ground, knees bent and ankles crossed, arms held out at his sides, fingers and thumb making an _O._ Aloud, and completely at random, he recited, "Egbert El, no school so swell, hear us yell for Egbert El! Sassafrassin' hootenanny, rah, rah, rah, scrabdoodle kiss my fanny, hah, hah, hah!"

Then he nodded and said, "Your wise counsel has helped me, honored ancestor. I go now to the place where I can depart this dimension."

He plastered a big smile on his face as he rose and walked back along the trail with a bounce in his step and the jingle of coins in his pocket. He really didn't feel like smiling, though, and each step felt as if he were walking toward his own grave.

Back in the Shack, up the stairs—he wished they would creak the way they always did, but in the interdimension, of course, things were silent. He re-entered the attic room. His eyes were playing tricks on him: For a moment he thought he saw himself, dressed out in his running gear, lying on the bed. Then that hallucination, or whatever it was, passed and there was only the bed with the note on it. Fleetingly, Dipper thought, _Wish I'd made up the covers this morning. I ought to try not to be such a slob._

Well, it probably wouldn't matter any longer.

He said aloud, "I know you're there. You might as well manifest if you're here to see me off."

And there was the Horroracle, so concentrated on him that it no longer bothered to shroud itself in gloom. It was only a floating sphere, draped in a deep gray cloak. No legs or feet, no arms or hands. _I will prevent you._

"I don't think so. You're really a coward. Taking me as your opponent 'cause I'm just a kid. Cutting me off from any help—or trying to. You're nothing but a bully. I'm about to leave you, Horroracle."

 _You cannot._

"Oh, yes I can. But first—I have a question. If you fail to answer it, you have to leave this set of dimensions forever."

A ferocious pulse of energy, as if the entity were gloating, but Dipper gave it no chance to speak.

Hoping it would work, Dipper yelled, "I offer—Dipper Pines! My question—WHY?"

Something left him with a jerk, a silvery streak, and the Horroracle burst out in anger, _WHY WHAT?_

"Fail!" Dipper shouted, feeling his legs folding under him. "No answer!"

The Horroracle imploded.

And Dipper felt all the world fading away as he crumpled to the floor. _I beat him. I beat him. And—I think I'm dying._


	11. Chapter 11

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 11: Morning and Evening**

Mabel was out of bed by eleven minutes past eight, and since she had been dreaming about meeting a handsome young guy on a yacht, when she remembered that the previous summer she had actually drawn such a yacht with her and her dream guy standing at the rail, she ran straight up the stairs and into Dipper's room to see if she could find the old sketch.

A moment later, everyone in the house—Soos, Melody, Abuelita, even Waddles and, out in the yard, Gompers—heard her scream and then wail, "Dipper! No! Dipper!"

Soos met her as she raced down the stairs from the attic. "Dipper!" she shouted through tears. "Soos, have you seen my brother?"

"Not this morning, Hambone," a startled Soos replied. "Why, is there like, something wrong, dude?"

Mabel waved a sheet of—well, maybe paper, maybe not, since it was irregularly eight-sided and made a metallic noise when she fluttered it—and said, "Read this! Oh, my God, what should we do?"

Soos read the first paragraph. He turned pale and said, "I'll call Mr. Pines."

Melody held a shaking Mabel in her arms. "I'm sure it'll be all right," she cooed. "Don't cry."

Mabel tried to writhe out of her embrace, shaking and sobbing. "All right? Wh-what if he's _dead_?"

"Maybe he is exercising with the tall girl," Abuelita suggested. Mabel rushed outside, yelling for her brother—but neither Dipper nor Wendy was there. Nor was anyone inside Wendy's beat-up old green car.

Then, half-distracted with her fears, Mabel ran to the bonfire log. No one there, either. "Dipper!" she shouted, balling her hands into fists. "Dipper! Where are you? _Dipper!_ Don't be dead! _Where are you_?"

Well, actually—

* * *

About five minutes or so, give or take, before Mabel went up to the attic, and not in that actual attic, in fact, but in the dream-world version of the real world that Ford called the Mindscape—

Dipper opened his eyes. He could see his bed—and himself, on his side, knees drawn up, looking shriveled, very still, and all in shades of gray. Very still indeed. Very . . . dead.

"Pine Tree! Shrink down! Quick, this isn't the frozen dimension! Here you got no time!"

 _Strange. This is not at all like I expected. I feel . . .peaceful. Calm._

"Tick-tock, Dipper Pines! Shrink! Now! You can always pass on to the Great Beyond later!"

 _Oh, all right._

With an easy flick of concentration, Dipper slid down the scale of size, until the figure of Bill Cipher—still without bow tie or hat, still consisting of only a few molecules, with the black one being an eyespot—floated nearby. It frantically extended the lower right corner of itself, which glowed an electric blue.

"I'm gonna help you, Pine Tree! No tricks, I promise! Shake! I can't help you, kid, if you don't shake on it! C'mon, no time to explain! No strings on this one! Going once, going twice—"

Even as he reached to shake Bill's—well, corner, not hand, he didn't _have_ hands—Dipper saw that his own fingers were fading, already transparent, but somehow he got a grip—

"Hang on, Pine Tree, this is gonna be a bumpy ride!"

Dipper, or his essence, felt itself yanked down a dark, rotating spiral, growing narrower as he sped through, towed by the golden blur of Bill Cipher. Out the narrow end, out of the Mindscape and then into the gray-toned interdimension, and into the body of Dipper Pines—

"Don't let go, Pine Tree, it's not over yet!"

No, so far he was only inside the interdimensional Dipper. The _real_ Dipper—

He saw his body, in color, on the bed—looking pale, lifeless, as if it were already too late—

But he whooshed through another spiral, this one prismatic with color, wondering what was going on—even as he rushed toward the body, it seemed to recede from him even faster.

Bill's frantic, pleading voice broke through: "Ya gotta really _want_ it, Pines! Think of Shooting Star! Think of Red! _Want_ it, kid!"

 _Mabel. Wendy._

 _Don't want to miss Sis's awkward teen years . . . want to dance with my Lumberjack Girl again . . . want it. Want it! WANT_ —

A sudden explosion of light, a wrenching pain in his heart, and Dipper gasped in one frantic breath and his heart pounded once, then stopped. Time stood still.

And then his heart beat again.

And one more time. And again.

He breathed, tasting life on his tongue.

His heart was _pounding_.

And before it slowed, he heard Wendy's voice at his door: "Dipper! Don't slag off on me, man!"

Dipper rolled out of bed and ran to open the door. He hugged Wendy. "I'm so glad to see you!"

She laughed and held him away from her. "Whoa, whoa! Hey, dude, me, too. C'mon, now. You're in your runnin' togs, so let's go! Hey, just 'cause we had a long night at the dance doesn't mean you can lay around all day, sucka!"

Dipper laughed nearly hysterically. "Right! Let's run! I'm ready!"

And by sheer bad timing, they actually hurried downstairs and outside exactly seventy-two seconds before Mabel emerged from her room and ran up the attic stairs to look for her drawing.

* * *

Once outside and on the driveway, Dipper ran at top speed, though the aches and weariness of his experiences in the interdimension seemed to hang on, or at least the memory of them did. It was hard to clench his right hand. The bruise he'd received from the hurtling silver coin seemed very real.

Hey, he didn't hear the clink of coins in his pocket! They had vanished! And the world was moving, everything alive and moving! Unless—unless the Horroracle was tricking him.

 _The magick shop! Have to check to see if it's there! If it is, I don't know what to do_.

Dipper was worried. But even the worry couldn't push away his sheer joy. He was _alive,_ and to prove it he ran even faster. Wendy fell a step behind and laughed. "Don't push too hard, Dip! You're gonna collapse on me any second, dude! Slow it down!"

"No! Keep up if you can!" He had a goal, and he couldn't wait to get there.

They raced side by side into town, and he waved at Blubs and Durland in their patrol car as it crept by, cruising slowly so Blubs at the wheel could drink his coffee and simultaneously text on his phone while Durland reached over from the passenger side to steer. Wendy and Dipper passed them, turned down the block, and Dipper jumped in the air, punching nothing, and then pointed. "It's gone!"

"Huh?"

"No Magick Shop!"

"Hey, it is gone! Cool! _Now_ will you slow down?"

"Nope! Catch me if you can!"

And then, still without slowing, they ran, both of them gasping and laughing, all the way back to the Mystery Shack.

Or very nearly. Because as they reached the driveway, a red-and-white El Diablo came roaring up behind them, made the turn with a spray of gravel, jammed on the brakes, and stopped in a cloud of dust a few feet in front of them. Stanley Pines boiled out of the driver's seat and opened the rear door, pointing into the car like a bad-tempered cop directing traffic. "In, you two! Buckle up! And don't give me no lip!"

Wendy and Dipper exchanged a worried glance. But they climbed into the car and fastened their seat belts for the fifty-foot ride.

Back inside the Shack, Mabel first hugged Dipper until he couldn't breathe, and then she began to swat his chest, yelping an angry word out with each blow. "Don't! You! EVER! DO! THAT! _AGAIN_!"

Dipper flinched under the hail of buffets. "Ow! OK, OK, but what did I _do_?"

She wiped her eyes and furiously shook the letter in his face.

Dipper's exuberance faded. In a small voice he said, "Oh. I forgot about that."

Wendy took the letter from Mabel and read it aloud and then looked up, her face so white the freckles stood out like ladybugs. "Dipper, dude, what's this about?"

"I'll tell ya what it's about!" Stan said, his face crimson with anger. "Dipper's been huntin' down some—" he hooked his fingers in air quotes—" _fantastic mystery,_ an' it turned on him an' he snuck out to try to slay the dragon or whatever—"

Dipper said, "No, it's not like that! And it wasn't my fault!" And of course then he had to tell the whole story, start to finish. Well, most of it, anyway.

"Wait a minute," Stanley growled. "You guys already told me that this Cipher guy got wiped out, and it was my doin'. So now he's back? And you didn't squash him like the bug he is?"

"He wasn't the bad guy," Dipper explained. "Not exactly, not this time. And I think—somehow—he helped me get back to, uh, the—land of the living?"

"Horroracle," Stan grumped. "Sounds like the monster of the week on _Duck-Tective!_ Look, kid, next time somethin' like this happens, you come straight to me or Ford, and that's an order, understand?"

"I did," Dipper reminded him. "Remember, it started when that Magick Shop showed up?"

Grunkle Stan crossed his arms and gave them his patented scowl, his gray eyebrows meeting over the bridge of his nose in a V of irritation. "Well—next time, _make us listen_!"

For some reason, Dipper felt very tired and very hungry. He had a huge breakfast, went into the gift shop to sit and talk to Wendy—somehow he didn't want to let her out of his sight—but fell asleep within ten minutes, and woke up still fully dressed some hours later on his bed in the attic.

He got up and hurried back downstairs. It was six o'clock, and Wendy was just retrieving her gym bag. "You finally decide to wake up, man?" she asked with a grin.

"Yeah. I—how'd I get up to the attic?"

"Soos carried you, dude. You were out like a little baby."

"Oh. Little . . . baby, huh? Well, that—that's, uh. That's me, I guess," he said lamely.

She gave him a playful punch on the arm. "Come on, Dip, what's botherin' you?"

"Will you take a walk with me?"

They headed into the woods, where the treetops glowed golden in the lowering sun. Dipper led Wendy to the sandy, weedy clearing where the stone Bill Cipher waited. There he said, "Wendy—I had a vision, I guess it was, that I didn't tell you about in the letter. In it, something horrible happened to you because you liked me." He gulped back pain. "I know we said we'd be friends and hang out and maybe over time see if we could, you know, make something bigger out of it. But—I don't want to hurt you or cause you pain. Not ever." He gulped hard. "So maybe it'd be better if, you know, we just canceled out the making it into something bigger part."

Wendy scowled at him. "Dipper, are you _breakin' up_ with me?"

"No! No, no, but Wendy, I—I want you to be safe. I couldn't stand it if anything happened to you." He swallowed hard again. "I think I'd die if I let anything hurt you."

She stepped close to him, her face stern as she locked gazes with him. "Dude, are you just _tryin'_ to make me mad?"

"No! Gosh, no!" Dipper shrugged. "But—in this crazy vision I died, and you just—you—well, you read the letter. You get the gist."

She hugged him. She held on and said softly in his ear, "Dipper, you said in the letter you loved me. Dontcha want to let me see if I can feel that way about you, when you're maybe two or three years older? 'Cuz I'm pretty stubborn, man, an' I'll tell you flat, I'm hangin' on. I'm not about to give up on you."

 _She's so warm. This is so nice._ He put his arms around her and stammered, "Re-really?"

She finally let go of him. "Yeah, really, dude! We got a _pact_ , man! Hey, no exercise tomorrow, remember? Rest and recoup day. But I think I'll come over in the afternoon anyhow. Maybe we could go into town and take in a movie or somethin'. Not a date, no pressure, Dipper. Just two good friends hangin' out and waitin' to see what happens. Right?"

Dipper couldn't even talk. He nodded and smiled and tried not to cry like a baby. "Gotta go now," she said, sighing. "Have to cook for my dad an' brothers before their bowling night." Then she smiled at him again. "Want to come over later an' watch some TV?"

He took a deep breath. "I—not tonight, thanks. I'd love to, but really I'd just poop out again. I don't know why I'm so sleepy."

"'Kay, it's cool. See you tomorrow, Dipper. Rest up—you're gonna need it!" She waved and swung off in her easy, long-legged stride down the path to the Shack.

Dipper stood in front of the Bill Cipher effigy. He reached up and delicately removed the little hummingbird's nest, which he carefully set down in some soft grass out of harm's way. Mabel would love to have it. "Bill? Where are you?"

Nothing. Well, maybe he had to try the Mindscape. And he was getting pretty good at putting himself in a kind of near-waking trance.

Settling down on the sandy patch, Dipper first thought _This is so much different from the interdimension! I can feel the grainy texture of sand—there's a stem of grass tickling my arm—Sun's so low the shadows are making everything cool. Air smells like green and growing things. And Wendy . . . ._

Before he realized it, Dipper was aware that he'd been hearing Bill's faint voice, which merely repeated one word over and over: "Need . . . need . . . need . . . need."

 _In the Mindscape you can do anything you can imagine._

Dipper shrank down, down, until he saw—"Is that you, Bill?"

Bill was no longer a triangle. Not even yellow any more. But there was the black eyespot, and above it a sphere of blue, and to the left of it one of a dark gray-blue, and to the right a red one, and beneath it a black one, and in the intervals some white and brown and pink.

"Pine . . . Tree. We . . . did . . . it." The voice had none of Bill's manic joviality. It was flat, exhausted.

"What happened to you?"

"Need . . . need . . . need more of me."

"If it helps, I took the tiny nest off your stone hat." _Wow. Only in Gravity Falls could that sentence not be totally insane!_

"Get . . . me . . . there."

"When I'm out of the Mindscape, I won't even be able to find you!"

"I'll . . . be . . . on . . . your . . . right . . . thumbnail. Put . . . me . . . there."

"OK, I'll try."

Dipper made himself wake up. He walked to the Cipher effigy, stretched up his right arm, and pressed his thumbnail to the top of the tall hat. _OK, now what?_

He did feel something—a kind of vague electric vibration. Then he heard a familiar laugh, small, faraway, but unmistakably Bill's _Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!_

"Bill? What happened?"

"Mindscape, Pine Tree! Stat!"

Once again Dipper relaxed and let his mind slip into the daydream-like trance and sized himself down. And this time—Bill Cipher bobbed in the air in front of him, much larger than he had been, with a fully-shaped eye and two stick-figure arms and hands. No legs yet, and no hat or cane—but he sported a strange little bowtie, not black, but light and dark blue, brown, pink, red, and black. "I guess you found some molecules," Dipper said.

"Oodles, of 'em, Pine Tree! Nest kept them from gettin' washed down into the pores of the stone! Hey, I'm nearly a micron on a side now! I'll be able to creep all over this handsome rock guy and sweep up enough of my remains to jump to my own dimension and rebuild myself completely! Shouldn't take more than a hundred years or so." He drooped a little. "That's to get in shape for the jump, I mean. Then in my dimension, the molecules are scattered over light-years. Slow going. I won't be all the way back to my old self for a few million million years."

"Bill," Dipper asked, "was I dead?"

"Well, kid, you were on your way. I wasn't sure it would work, but I managed to drag you back into that noodle-legged body of yours."

 _If Bill had been dying, would I have helped him? After what he tried to do to my family? To the world?_ Dipper couldn't decide, and he asked, "But—why would you even do that? We've never been friends."

Now Bill had something of his old smirking sarcasm back: "You haven't tumbled to it, meatsack? Look, it wasn't exactly an act of _charity_. The Horroracle slammed your spark of life back into you, sure, but he also tossed you back into your dimension without starting time running again. He bailed, but he left time still stuck! And it wouldn't start unless _you_ started!"

"You said . . . I was the load-bearing spirit."

"Exactly, Pine Tree! The flow of time depended on your living, and with the huge shock the Horroracle gave you, snatching your spark of life and then smashing it back inside you, he thought you _wouldn't_ live. If you hadn't come back to life, this dimension wouldn't have exactly _ended_ , but it wouldn't have started up again, either. Stasis forever, everything eternally frozen, me on the outside of it all, and then I couldn't manage to escape from the Mindscape and into your dimension to rebuild myself. Meanwhile, the Horroracle would be off gloating that he'd escaped and had ended life in this set of dimensions. That would almost count as destroying it, though it would really have been suspended animation, not death. Anyway, getting time moving again was a purely selfish act on my part, but you were the key. So I had to sort of wake that spark up inside you, jump-start you."

"How?"

"Organ donation, kid. I gave you my molecules. There's a lotta energy in molecules, ya know. Just ask my old pal Einstein."

"Wait, what? You mean—I've got part of you in me now?"

Bill threw up his hands in mock horror. "Eek! Gross! Is part of Bill in me now? Oh, yeah, baby, but you won't notice any difference, outside of the improvement! And hey, look at my tie. This is part of you in me. I guess beginning today I'll have to do the right thing now and then. Like every ten thousand years or so? That sound OK to you?"

"Part of me in—I'm not sure I like that!"

Bill laughed. "Well, that's tough, Pine Tree. Face it. We're _hermanos_ now!" He put a finger up to the place where a mouth should have been, if he'd had one, and the expression in his eye became thoughtful. "Gee, now I'm sad, 'cause I guess that means I can't marry Mabel, after all."

"Wait, what!"

"Ah-ha-ha-ha! Just messin' with you, kid. It's funny how gullible you can be. Don't worry, I never really planned to join in unholy matrimony with your sis. After all, there are plenty of other geometrical shapes in the multiverse!"

Dipper felt like taking a few dozen hot showers. "You—you can't take back the molecules you left inside me?"

Sounding a little more serious, Bill said, "Don't really know. Maybe I could, but there's a 90 per cent chance of it killing you, kid. Hey, don't be so glum! There's not enough of me in you to make a real difference. You won't start drinking soda through your eyes or being able to do magic by pointing your finger or anything. And anyway, look at how I just improved your chances with Red!" The triangle winked and seemed to grin suggestively with its eye. " _Every_ girl likes a good guy who's got a little bit of bad boy inside him!"

"Not Wendy!"

"Hmm. You might be surprised, Pine Tree." Bill seemed to shrug, as much as an equilateral triangle can. "The little bit of me in you won't amount to much. Don't obsess over it. Go on, Dipper. Live your life. I'll keep my word. When I manage to leave this dimension, I won't come back. And neither will the Horroracle, by the way. He's only been beaten three times before, and he's left those dimensions strictly alone. Congrats, kid. Go on your way for now, and one of these days—" his voice became a playful sing-song—"I'll be _seein'_ ya."

"OK, Bill," Dipper said. "Well—you kinda gave me back my life. I guess I ought to thank you. I see you have hands again. Maybe we're not friends, but—shake?"

He held out his hand, and Bill drifted close. "Aw, you humans are so sentimental! Yeah, Pine Tree, I guess we've been through enough together for that. Put 'er there."

And as Bill reached out, Dipper yanked his own hand back over his shoulder. "Psyche!"

Bill Cipher roared with laughter. "See, that's me in you, Pine Tree! I love it! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Get outa here, ya little bum, and let me go molecule hunting!"

Mabel met Dipper halfway back to the Shack, and she carried a flashlight—though it wasn't yet really dark out. "I was worried," she said.

Dipper's heart felt as if it were about to overflow. "Sibling hug," he said.

"Why?" Mabel asked.

"For no reason."

"OK, that sounds good enough for me." They hugged. She rested her face against his and whispered, "Never again, you hear me?"

"Yeah," he said, giving her an extra squeeze. "Never again. Unless you've got my back." When they stepped apart, he bent down for the hummingbird nest.

"Whatcha got there?"

"I'll give it to you later."

"I love surprises!" She laughed and then reached for his hand. "C'mon, brobro. I wanna show you a picture I did."

Though the sky was still bright, she switched on her flashlight, they walked hand in hand back to the Mystery Shack, and Dipper thought that never before had he noticed with such aching clarity how beautiful an Oregon evening could be.


	12. Chapter 12

**A Taste of Ashes**

 **Chapter 12: Afterword from Bill**

 **From the Journals of Bill Cipher:** Why in the heck am I starting a Journal? I prefer a random way of life, and randomosity doesn't leave much time for writing and reflecting. In fact, I _never_ reflect! Don't look back, that's my motto, and with only one eye and with only two dimensions, that's easy! Ah ha-ha-ha-ha!

That laugh sure looks dumb written out. Well, not actually written. I'm causing words to form in the air. Don't know what I'll do with them once I've finished, maybe steal some paper and slap them down on it. But why am I making a Journal? The question's driving me sane! Got to get to the bottom . . . of . . . that . . . mystery.

Hah! I know!

It's not me at all, it's Pine Tree! When I donated my molecules to him, I had to have something to protect my eye, so I grabbed a molecule here, a molecule there, from him! Just little stuff he'd never miss! And now my tie is all sorts of patchy colors, and that's because of him!

His molecules are influencing me!

Well, _that's_ different. Never had anything like this happen before.

I mean, when I took over his ridiculous little noodle-armed body as my puppet, I didn't get contaminated _then_. Of course, I didn't try to take anything from him—who would want it? I wasn't molecule-shopping then.

OK, OK, let me make some sense out of all this. Though nonsense is usually sense enough for me! Next time I see Dipper, I have to remember to thank him for this little change of personality. Maybe by ripping out all his toenails. Why do people even _have_ toenails? Fingernails I can see, you can use 'em as a backscratcher if you don't have a gold Fordsy around, but toenails?

I'm off the track. I can't think straight! I need my hat. Don't have enough power yet to grow a hat! I didn't tell Pine Tree, but that hat is vital! It's part of me! _It's my antenna to pick up subtle radiation from my own dimension!_

And that's where most of my brain is. With my hat, I could access my smarts, I could think and plan! I'd be more me than I am now! Oh, man, I miss it, but I don't mind it. 'Cause I don't have a mind to mind it with! Ah ha-ha-ha-ha!

Writing a laugh down really makes it look stupid. I need some minions with a bum sense of humor to laugh when I tell a joke. Nothing like a laugh track, except an audience of idiots!

Betcha Mabel would like my jokes.

I like Mabel. She's random! I should've possessed her instead of Pine Tree! She'd have liked that. Maybe if I'd given her body back afterward she'd have knitted me a sweater! Good old Shooting Star.

Of course, that time in the Fearamid, I _was_ about to kill her when Fordsy and Stanley pulled that dirty trick, but that wasn't about my feelings for her. It was strictly business.

Stanley and Stanford, oh man. What low-down, sneaky, rotten cheaters they are! I really got to admire those guys!

Gah, I can't concentrate! Not enough of me, and not enough of my hat! Not anything of my hat. I calculate I'll have to double my size to be able to create one. Let's see, at the rate I'm going, that'll take twenty-one Earth years.

Molecules of me may be scarce, but I do have tons of junk and odd human memories lodged in my consciousness from possessing Ford and Pine Tree! Kid's books I never wanted to read, for example! I'm a cat in a hat!

Funny, I got nothing from Blendin Blenjamin Blandin. Zip-o. Possessing that guy was like possessing a lump of mashed time potatoes. Except they'd be more interesting.

The worst, the absolute _worst_ part of being contaminated with Dipper's molecules is that whenever I _do_ start to plan anything, I get distracted by daydreaming about Red.

The coolest person I ever met!

She's such an amazing girl! Did I ever dance with her? I have this weird memory of us dancing! And something called a kiss! Humans do it with the orifice under their nose. I'd use my eye. Ah, Red, Red! I'd like to transform her into a nice curvy circle and take her away with me to my own dimension.

Ah, Red.

No, wait, that's Pine Tree thinking, not me. I wonder if he's feeling more chaotic lately. Probably not. His mass is a lot greater than my mass, and the proportion of me in him is minute. Inside him, I'm a minute man. Well, he can just kiss my mass. Why do I even think those are funny? Something's serially wrong with me!

Also, I have this tune running through my head over and over, if I had a head for it to run through. Really catchy, and I keep getting glimpses of some kind of cartoony thing that's all about me. And Pine Tree and Shooting Star have, like, supporting roles. Hmm. Needs lyrics.

* * *

It's getting weird in Gravity Falls!

'Round each corner the Unknown ca-alls!

Dipper is facing dangers,

Mabel is dating strangers,

But when the chase begins,

They are the Mys'try Twins!

Shake my hand and you will see

That you never should trust in me! Bing!

* * *

Meh. I could do better. I know I could.

Just wait until I regrow my hat. . . .

* * *

The End. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Still looks dumb.


End file.
